I REMEMBER the low stone building on the bottom left, on the Barnsley Road by he dam head at Newmillerdam, being a popular Italian restaurant back in the 1980s. This was the old watermill, a successor to the medieval corn mill that gave the village its name. The waterwheel itself was preserved, dominating the centre of the room but sadly it was later destroyed in a fire. Enough of the shell of the building survived to allow its restoration.
Somewhere amongst the houses beyond there’s a show home which was exhibited in the Ideal Homes exhibition in Olympia in the late 1950s or early 1960s before being reconstructed here.
Further up the hill there’s a row of old stone-built terraced cottages that Barbara and visited when we were house-hunting. Despite the attractive location we had to cross it off our list as the ceiling was too low for me to stand upright. Much as I love period features, I couldn’t have coped with that.
I drew this with an ArtPen filled with El Lawrence brown Noodler’s ink and added the colour later, using a photograph that I’d taken as reference.