page_title: Great Tew
section_title: Mills
hierarchical_section_title: Great Tew / Economic and social history / Mills
caption_attribution_description: English: Thatched cottage in Brook Road, Great Tew, Oxfordshire
context_page_description: Great Tew is an English village and civil parish in the Cotswold Hills in Oxfordshire, about 5 miles north-east of Chipping Norton and 8 miles south-west of Banbury. The 2011 Census recorded a parish population of 156, so that it has an annual parish meeting instead of a parish council. In 2018, it was reported that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had leased a property on the Great Tew estate.
context_section_description: Great Tew is stated to have two watermills by the 13th century. Both were still in use when the estate was surveyed in 1778. Mill Lane, about 600 yards (550 m) north of the village, is named after a mill that was built or rebuilt in the 17th century for wool processing. Traces of its mill pond, mill stream and wheel chamber were still visible in the early 1980s. Further north, about 1 mile (1.6 km) from the village, there was a mill on the stream near Cottenham Farm. Traces of its mill ponds, buildings and two water wheels were still visible in the early 1980s, and a small wood there is still called Pool Spinney. One mill had ceased to be used by the time G. F. Stratton sold the estate in 1815; the other was disused by 1837.
  One of J. C. Loudon's works for G. F. Stratton after 1808 was an elaborate watermill at Tracey Farm in the south of the parish. It was a bone mill, because the British Agricultural Revolution had identified lime as a fertiliser and bone meal as a source of it. The stream at Tracey Farm was dammed in a mill pond, and both the leat feeding the water wheel and the tail race downstream of it were in brick-lined tunnels, the latter 20 feet (6 m) below ground. Whereas most Oxfordshire watermills have an undershot or a breastshot wheel, Loudon adopted a more efficient backshot wheel. It was made of wood and iron and was 16 feet (5 m) in diameter.
  A sawmill powered by a beam engine was built in the middle of the 19th century. The beam engine has gone but the engine house and its tall chimney survive.
caption: One of the thatched cottages in Brook Road
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