Coulton Mill Restoration Home

Historic houses, both humble and grand,

have all played their part in the story of our nation,

but today many are at risk and some in danger of being lost forever.

I'm going to be following the fortunes of six properties,

all facing their own struggle for survival...

Oh, look! You can see the round. Wow!

It's like walking into a, kind of, Tudor fantasy.

This is not quite what I was expecting.

..and they all have new owners committed to turning them

into their dream home.

A bit like a little old lady waiting for a face-lift

and we're coming in to make her better.

I never, ever thought I would do a project like this in my life before.

I have spent years restoring derelict old properties,

and having poured everything into trying to create my perfect family home,

I know what a challenge it is to rescue a precious old building.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

There's a lot riding on it, isn't there? It's scary times.

We love it, we want to finish it,

but sometimes it just feels like too much.

It's Restoration Home.

Covering nearly 6,000 square miles,

Yorkshire includes some of Britain's most beautiful scenery.

With vast swathes of unspoilt landscape,

it's no wonder it's acquired the nickname God's Own County.

It was also at the heart of the Industrial Revolution

and by harnessing the waterways, helped drive mechanical processes

that would make Britain truly great.

The earliest watermills were the beating heart of a local community.

Today, precious few survive intact.

Those that do are hanging on for brave individuals

to breathe new life into them.

This is Coulton Mill in North Yorkshire,

a collection of rural buildings from a bygone age.

The old watermill, which turned grain into flour for centuries,

stopped working just after the Second World War.

Its archaic wooden machinery is gradually rotting away.

The mill is joined to the miller's house next-door,

and the whole place has serious rising damp.

Two barns across the road are derelict and in danger of collapse.

It's something of a miracle that such a rare group of buildings

has survived into the 21st century.

They have a Grade II listing and come with ten acres of land,

but without a saviour, this remarkable relic

of a vanished way of life could be lost forever.

Now, one couple want to rescue Coulton Mill and rekindle its past.

They're Yorkshireman Nick Burrows and his American wife, Heather.

I loved this place from the minute Nick showed me the brochure of it.

He said, "Don't you want to go and see it?"

And I said, "No, I don't need to - I want to live there."

Heather came to England as an undergraduate student

and stayed on to do her PhD

She fell in love with Nick and now they're married

with three-year-old daughter Sybilla.

It's their first chance to put down roots,

because Nick works overseas -

currently as part of the UK government's reconstruction team

in Afghanistan's Helmand province.

I spend a lot of time all over the world

trying to help other people build their own lives,

but to build something which is our own rural idyll

I think is something most people would dream about.

Come on.

Nick's away from home for long stretches,

so Heather will oversee much of the restoration.

I am here with Sybilla most of the time on my own.

He comes back about every six weeks for two weeks

and upturns our schedule.

Let's go upstairs and get you dressed. Come on.

With Sybilla at nursery school, Heather also has a part-time job as an English teacher.

Even though there's no proper heating

and the walls are green with damp, she was keen to move in

to the old miller's house as soon as they bought the place.

It's beautiful waking up in the morning

and hearing the pheasants or hearing the owls at night

and just seeing the sun come through the windows

and think, "OK, we're going to do this, this and this," and making it our own.

It's Coulton Mill's ten acres and old buildings

that really excite Heather.

She grew up with animals in rural North America,

and wants use the fields and restore the barns here

to create her own small farm.

I think that's more important than the house, actually.

Nick was like, "What do you want firstly?

"Do you want kitchen floors or do you want pigs?"

Pigs!

For the Burrows family,

Coulton Mill seems to offer the perfect English rural dream.

It's a place for us to have a married life

and to bring up our daughter Sybilla

and anyone else who comes along in due course,

but the added bonus to that is the farm buildings

that allow us to run a smallholding.

And it's also got the mill, which has memories that go back

an awful long way for a lot of people.

Nick and Heather paid £305,000 to buy the ten acres

next to the Yorkshire stream that once drove the mill,

the miller's house and mill attached,

and the two derelict barns across the road.

But they don't have the money to tackle everything at once,

and work on the barns will have to wait.

The immediate priority is to make the house

fit to live in as their home.

There are potentially five bedrooms on the first floor and in the attic.

On the ground floor, there are two living rooms at the front

and a large kitchen at the back

adjoining the old farm dairy, and a larder.

They've made a conservative estimate for restoration costs

over the first year or so.

We need to spend £50,000, but that's on the underside.

To do everything we want to do,

we'll need to spend quite a bit more.

As for the old mill, there's no budget at all.

But for local people, this building,

with its crumbling wooden waterwheel,

is the symbolic heart of the community's past.

They constantly come by and they say,

"When are you going to get the mill wheel running again?"

And they constantly ask that, so I think it's an important thing

for the history of the place and the whole community.

Simon Harrison is the son of Coulton's last miller.

His father, Thomas, sold up in 1950,

and before he died he made a working model of the mill.

It's purely a copy of Coulton Mill but all out of memory,

and he had no plans, no drawings, anything.

He'd obviously never forgotten the place,

it broke his heart to leave it and to watch it

go into decline so possibly it was his way of preserving his memory.

To find out if anything can be done to save the mill,

Nick and Heather have called in Yorkshire mill historian

John Harrison - no relation.

-Ah, now, look at that.

-Ah, wow.

Now, that wheel is really old,

completely made of wood, it's got to be 18th century, I would think,

which is really old for any kind of watermill.

Frozen in time since the mill closed over 60 years ago,

the antiquated machinery is riddled with woodworm and beyond repair.

Oh, look - you can see the round!

Yeah. There we go. That's where the millstone was.

Hidden beneath the sheets of corrugated iron

is the hole where two millstones once ground against each other

to turn grain into flour.

Oh, wow!

Today, the stones are missing

and the mill's workings are silted up and waterlogged,

but John believes the crumbling waterwheel is unique.

I've looked at mills across this country and other places as well

and I haven't seen another one of this layout.

It's a very old design.

They've no idea how they're going to do it, but Nick and Heather

are determined to try and rescue the wheel.

If the mill is a body,

this is the lifeblood that runs through it

and without this it's static and stagnant.

When this turns again, the mill comes to life.

But for now, all their resources

must go on creating a home to live in.

For Heather and three-year-old Sybilla,

it means months living in a cold, damp house

with builders working around them.

The only heating that's been in the house has been from the coal fires,

the wood fires that she's got

and you see if you come a bit further down there, look...

Look at all this.

This is damp, that is actually damp, is that.

That was a bit drier up there, but this is actually damp is this.

You can see how it's tacky.

That's it, that's all the way through the house.

I think she's an amazing woman to actually live through this,

really, y'know, everything, from the floors to the roof,

the walls the insulation, the electrics, heating, everything.

It's dirty and it's cold and there's mud everywhere.

Sybilla loves it, it's so important to me to know

that she has a place she can call home

and just be able to explore and have that freedom,

but she does say it's cold and she's wondering

when the house is going to be fixed.

I can't decide whether Heather is heroic, brave

or just plain bonkers

for moving into a house that needs so much work,

next to a crumbling mill where the building and the machinery

is on its last legs.

But there's no doubting the passion she and Nick share

wanting to not only restore bricks and mortar,

but also the sense of community at Coulton Mill,

that sense of community that must have been lost

when Thomas Harrison, the last miller who worked there,

moved out in the 1950s.

It was a community that had been there for centuries.

Historian Dr Kate Williams is digging deep into the archives

to try and find out how far back Coulton Mill goes.

And architectural expert Kieran Long starts his investigation

by examining the DNA of the buildings themselves.

We have the road running through the site here

almost, kind of, embracing the house in its, kind of, elbow

and then behind us we have these two rather charmingly dilapidated barns,

creating a very interesting little complex, little spaces

in between these various buildings.

It's very typical of a kind of pre-industrial farm complex

and it's really, really beautiful,

and the house itself has a certain kind of grace,

you know, it's not just a farmhouse

there's definitely some thought gone into it, large windows...

The house is believed to date back to the 18th century.

Kieran quickly realises it must have always had a running battle

with its natural surroundings.

Here they've had to build a huge retaining wall

to hold back the hillside and carve a little space for the house to sit.

It's incredibly damp here,

there must be all of the water from surrounding hillsides,

kind of, funnelling itself into this basin,

undermining the building, more or less,

or at the very least, kind of, compromising its fabric

so it's quite amazing the building's still here.

The original covering on the outside walls

of Nick and Heather's house

was designed to combat the damp environment.

It's been rendered over with this lime render

and that's quite an interesting technique,

one that's quite typical in rural buildings

because it's easy to repair and it uses locally available materials

and we can see some of that up close here.

You can see that this is not cementitious render, not cement.

It's made of lime, you can see hairs, little pebbles in there

and sticks and so on. It's really like earth.

All of these buildings had to allow moisture in

and, most importantly, out so that moisture didn't sit in the timber work

or into the stone and start to destroy it,

so the lime render is a vital part of that, kind of, breathing effect

that these buildings needed to have.

The derelict barns have survived the ravages of time less well.

You have more signs of inhabitation here,

initials carved into the doorpost.

A tree trunk and other improvised supports

appear to be all that's keeping the roof on the building.

I don't want to touch these in case they all come crashing down,

but it's as many bits of wood as it takes to kind of support this thing

and, you know, it's quite charming to see this,

but it does tell you a story about how poor

the condition of these buildings really is.

When Kieran steps inside the mill,

he's surprised the crumbling wooden machinery has survived at all.

It looks rather romantic with these cogs and wheels lying still,

but when we take another step up here and you start to...

When I put my hand on this beam, you can feel the moisture.

I mean, it's absolutely sodden, all of this timberwork

is in terrible, terrible condition, and as you look further down

towards the ground where there's more moisture,

you start to see more decay and even more degradation of the fabric.

Without some kind of rescue,

it's clear these extraordinary pre-industrial mill workings

will eventually be lost forever.

This is just one, no doubt in a network of mills,

to process the food that provided bread to this whole region

so this is a kind of snapshot of an England that's gone,

that probably existed from the medieval period

right up to the 19th century and to see all this stuff here now

is really to get a flavour of England in that time.

To get an idea of what Nick and Heather's mill was like when it was working,

Kieran makes a short journey across the countryside.

This is Crakehall Mill, recently restored -

and it once performed the same vital job as Coulton for its community.

To me, what's kind of immediately striking is just how noisy it is.

You know, my ear's right close to this wheel here

and it's going like the clappers,

it's really a piece of industrial machinery

and, you know, you can imagine the forces at work here

the building needs to withstand,

and the machinery needs to withstand.

The millstones are missing at Coulton,

but here they still grind grain

as Nick and Heather's building would have done,

turning it into the staple ingredient for bread.

This is what it's all about, producing this stuff,

which is beautiful stone-ground wholemeal flour.

This was the gold, the stuff that was driving

both the wealth and economy of these places

but also, just, people could subsist on this.

We still have huge problems all over the world

trying to create enough of this stuff

to feed the world's population

and this was the start of that effort.

At Crakehall, you can see how the power of the water

was harnessed to drive the mill.

What happens is water is diverted from the river further up there

into this long millpond and this is 100 metres long or more,

contains a serious amount of water,

but in a controlled way it then comes through this sluice gate

and gives a consistent power to the waterwheel here.

At Coulton, there probably would have been even more force acting

because the water was coming from an even higher level

driving the wheel from the top.

Coulton Mill had what's known as an "overfall" waterwheel,

using gravity to increase the power of the water.

It meant the wall the wheel is attached to

would have taken quite a battering

and centuries of pounding are likely to have affected the whole house.

Coulton's millpond, now dry, was on the high ground behind the building.

We're now up at the roof level, the eaves level,

but we're standing on the ground,

which just tells you how dug into the hillside this building is,

and of course it had to be

because it needed to be able to use the drop in the geography

and bring the water down at high pressure.

We can see the, kind of, race, if you like,

the moment where the water gets speeded up

in order for it to shoot into the wheel and drive those massive stones

and drive the gears that would be inside the mill house.

Today, Coulton's waterwheel hasn't turned for over 60 years,

and looks like it could fall to pieces at any moment.

Heather has recruited mill historian John

and a team of helpers to see if they can do anything to save it.

It's been sitting in water for probably 40, 50 years

so they're trying to get the water to drain out of the wheel basin.

When the wheel turned, water was channelled away

into the mill's "tail-race" on the other side of the road,

but the tail-race has been silted up for decades,

leaving the wooden wheel perilously waterlogged.

Heather and her helpers are trying to dig out the old race and get the water away.

-Ah!

-Ooh, ooh!

There you are.

We've got another one. Look, he's talking to you!

Come on, little guy.

They find local wildlife, but no solution to the problem.

Despite hours of digging,

the wheel is still rotting in a pool of stagnant water.

But Heather refuses to abandon her dream.

My aim is to still have the wheel turning.

I think people will love to see that

and I really want Sybilla to see that.

The big question is whether the existing wheel

will ever be capable of turning again.

Nick and Heather have called in

one of just a handful of experts in the UK who can advise them.

Martin Watts is a specialist millwright.

There are two issues with the waterwheel.

One is obviously getting the water here and on to the top of the wheel,

but just as important is getting the water away from it.

Is it worth doing?

One option, of course, is just to leave it as it is

and just to have it almost like a romantic ruin, really.

That's fine, but it will deteriorate,

it will get worse, it's also -

when you look at the state of the timberwork, here,

supplying the wheel with water -

that's going to collapse.

The millwright thinks the only solution will be a replica.

It would be better to dismantle what's left of the waterwheel,

which is enough to provide a very good pattern for building a new one,

-which I think should be done in the same way.

-I agree.

The fact that it's atypical is very much part of its interest.

But rebuilding the wheel will cost thousands.

There's a bottom line with all these things and cost is that bottom line.

I don't know how much exactly it's going to cost,

but I think it's really worth making the effort with the wheel

because it's so fundamental to what the building is and its past

and it should be part of its future.

As costs mount, Nick and Heather decide to investigate

the possibility of a grant, not just for the waterwheel,

but for their other plans to bring Coulton Mill back to life,

including the restoration of the barns.

We've looked at different options for applying for funding,

we've looked at English Heritage and stuff like that,

I've thought about a lottery grant,

and it's very rare that a private place

would actually get funding like that, it's usually for more civic things.

After researching the options,

Heather has decided to chance her arm

and apply to the government agency, Natural England.

It's a long shot, but she hopes the idea

of opening Coulton Mill to the public might help the application.

I'm, sort of, pushing the education side of it

where I do want to have school visits

and I do want to do quite a few of them

because of the historical importance of the mill

and its use within the community.

We know that we have to do something like that in order to achieve

the thing that we want to achieve.

The wooden machinery in the mill

is believed to date back to the 18th century,

and Nick and Heather's house next-door is a similar age.

But there's evidence there could have been a milling community here

for much longer than that.

Historian Kate Williams

has been trying to find the earliest reference to a mill at Coulton.

There's nothing in the 11th-century Domesday Book,

which mentions over 5,000 mills.

But in the county archives,

she finds a crucial 13th-century manuscript.

It's a legal document which records a Walter of Colton

acquiring a mill owned by the local abbey.

This piece of paper is over 700 years old, about 1234,

and it's about Coulton Mill being sold,

being swapped for some land to a local man.

It shows me what abbey it is - it's the convent of Byland,

which is an abbey that we know was very near to here,

and it was one of the big and most important abbeys of the area.

It's so rare in Britain we can trace back our houses,

many of our buildings, to that far back.

I mean, this is the kind of thing we associate with Westminster Abbey,

not somewhere we might live.

Kate has established the mill was originally owned

by a powerful order of medieval monks.

They were based here,

less than ten miles from where Nick and Heather live, at Byland Abbey.

Architectural expert Kieran picks up the story.

We've made a really exciting discovery

that connects a mill at Coulton with this place,

one of the three extraordinary, huge, rich, wealthy monasteries

of this area of Yorkshire. Probably the other two are more famous - Rievaulx and Fountains -

and these three abbeys dominated the landscape economically

and were exactly the kind of concentrations of power and wealth

that the Reformation and Henry VIII wanted to destroy,

and indeed did, which is why we see this thing in ruins.

When they owned the mill - and swapped it

for Walter of Colton's land in the early 13th century -

the Cistercian monks here were hugely influential

in England's medieval world.

They were incredibly sophisticated farmers here at Byland Abbey.

They were selling futures in sheep to Italian traders

and also, of course, they were milling and farming crops

as well as fishing and lots of other things.

We tend to see the mill now

as a kind of isolated piece of machinery in the countryside,

you know, there for grinding wheat,

but actually it was part of a much bigger fabric

of which this is the, kind of, heart, if you like.

That's a complete transformation of our understanding of Coulton Mill.

When I pay my first visit to Coulton Mill,

the builders have already been in for months.

To try and tackle the damp, they've installed underfloor heating,

the first time the house has had any source of warmth

apart from coal fires.

But when the builders dug out the floor to install the heating pipes,

they discovered a bigger problem.

-Hello.

-Hi, what are you doing?

We're doing some drainage to take the water out of the house.

-There's water in the house is there?

-Well, it's just below the floor.

-OK.

Because when we excavated the floor

we found virtually a pond just below the floor.

So the millpond has made its way under the house, has it?

Yeah. Usually millponds aren't supposed to be in the dwelling.

THEY LAUGH

Sorting out the drainage will be an extra cost

they hadn't bargained for.

But with the heating now in and working, Heather can at least

welcome Nick back from Afghanistan to a drier home.

When they turned the heating on

we just thought it was the most amazing thing

because within a day, it took it about 24 hours to warm up,

you could start feeling the warmth come up from the floor and it was fantastic.

I've done this kind of restoration myself,

but not with my other half over 3,000 miles away.

It looks shockingly, sort of, dishevelled, doesn't it?

But I, too, have lived like this.

You must have had moments when you were here

when Nick's away in Afghanistan when you thought, "What am I doing?"

Yes, well, he knows. I'd call up on the telephone,

"If I have to clean up another pile of dust

-"I'm going to give up!"

-Hard on your own, actually. I've never done that.

-That must be...

-It's just the cleaning and the constant,

"OK, we've got to completely wipe down the table

"before we even lay it for supper."

It's important we work together on it and although we're... I'm a long way away,

-I'd like to think it's a joint project with us, isn't it?

-Yep.

Although I have to admit, Heather is bearing the brunt of it right now.

-Ooh!

-Just be careful.

-OK.

'There's still a lot of work to do upstairs.

'For now, when Nick's home, all three of them are sleeping in one room.'

This is going to be the main bedroom in the house.

Obviously it'll be a lot tidier eventually.

Actually, given that you haven't got anywhere to put anything

I think you're doing remarkably well.

There are compensations for Heather when Nick's away.

She acquires animals for the farm.

Sybilla and I really love animals, Nick is getting there.

My wife has a way of collecting things when I'm away.

Piggy, piggy, piggies...

The latest arrivals are five Oxford Sandy and Blacks -

a rare breed of English porker.

Big piggy!

The growing menagerie also includes a flock of Hebridean sheep,

an orphaned lamb called Charlie,

two cats

and two dogs, Henry and Pippin.

The idea is the two derelict barns will eventually house animals.

So far, it's been a matter of praying both buildings stay standing.

There's a grant application in to help with restoration,

but for now Nick and Heather must fund essential repairs themselves.

One of the barns needs emergency structural work,

and two supporting walls are being rebuilt

and re-pointed using traditional lime mortar.

Paying for that means work on the second barn will have to wait.

I'd love to get this barn done, but the reality is

we just don't have the money to do everything all at once

and so the other barn, the end of the other barn,

where the gable wall was particularly unstable

was the priority and I'm glad that's been done,

but I'm not convinced this is going to last another winter, not with the roof the way it is.

Once you get water ingress coming in through the roof

then it rapidly deteriorates.

As Nick and Heather's restoration dilemmas mount,

our investigations are shedding more light

on the history of Coulton Mill.

Historian Kate Williams has been tracing the mill's ownership

after it passed from the monks at Byland Abbey

to Walter of Colton in the 13th century.

She's discovered that 500 years later,

the owners were the Fairfax family, major Yorkshire landowners.

The document she's found only exists

because the Fairfaxes were Catholics,

and in the early 1700s, Britain lived in fear of a papist uprising.

This document is a papist land register. This one is from 1720.

It is an account of all the land in the area

owned by the Catholic landowners. People were genuinely afraid

of a Catholic rebellion, a Catholic takeover,

so the authorities need to keep a proper track

of exactly what the Catholics have got, and Coulton Mill

is listed as a crucial asset of a major Catholic family.

The document also shows the mill was powered in the same way in 1720

as it was when the wheel last turned in the 20th century.

Coulton's waterwheel is described as "overfall",

where the water strikes the top.

Architectural expert Kieran

has found a crucial piece of 18th-century research

which suggests Coulton's waterwheel

could well have made its millers wealthier than others.

A member of the prestigious Royal Society, civil engineer John Smeaton

conducted a series of scientific and mathematical experiments

to test the effectiveness of overfall waterwheels,

or "overshot" wheels, as they're more usually called.

He presented to the Royal Society in 1759 his findings

and his findings were that overshot wheels like Coulton Mill

were nearly 100% more efficient than undershot wheels.

They were extremely efficient because they used gravity

as well as the momentum of the water

and he proved it through numbers and through his own experiments.

Coulton's waterwheel was ahead of its time.

We know in the 1720s when the Fairfaxes owned Coulton Mill

it had an overshot wheel, and that predates

all of this work by Smeaton in 1759.

That tells me that the Coulton Mill wheel

would have been one of the most efficient in the country

and it was efficient before it was proven to be efficient by Smeaton.

It would have been a very important piece of machinery

for the farming economy of that part of North Yorkshire.

Nearly 250 years after Smeaton demonstrated

the efficiency of overfall waterwheels,

Nick and Heather's wheel is still in limbo,

waiting to see if funding from Natural England

might give it a new life.

For now, the restoration of the house is still eating money.

A natural stone fireplace, using local craftsmen and materials,

is costing over £3,000.

We've made it in our workshop just up the road.

It's made out of Tadcaster limestone.

It's York's most local limestone and at the moment

it's being used on the restoration of York Minster.

It's all been handcrafted with mallets and chisels

and traditional stonemasonry tools

and the customer wants it looking perfect.

Let's have a look. A-ha.

Oh, it's absolutely stunning. You can now really see where the house is going.

-What are you going to toast on the fire?

-Toast.

Yes, that makes sense. What about marshmallows?

-Marshmallows.

-Yeah.

Isn't that beautiful?

Outside, tackling the drainage problems that have plagued the house

is also costing over £3,000 -

money that was never in Nick and Heather's budget.

But the builders hope they've reduced the risk

of water flooding the house.

It just wasn't escaping and that should now

keep the water table at least another foot lower than it was.

The drains are probably the last thing you ever think about

and I must admit I hadn't realised that we were going to be

spending a lot of money and a lot of time and effort doing drains.

Now, just paint in there.

A year after they moved in to Coulton Mill, Heather and Sybilla

are finally able to start putting a personal stamp on the decor.

Getting the plaster on the walls was a huge step

because it cleaned up the house dramatically

and now actually being able to paint,

we just might have a dining room.

-If you're standing there, I'm going to paint your leg.

-OK.

They're now trying to save on all their restoration costs

to make their money go further.

We did want to have people to decorate the house,

but with new things that have happened and stuff like that

it just adds up, and if we can save a little money here and there

then that means we can get something else done all the quicker.

Paint this wall. Paint this wall. Oh, dear.

Sybilla is now four years old.

I think it's so important that she has a part

in the making of the house, too,

because then she knows that she has a stake in it,

she knows that it's part of her.

She's chosen some of the colours herself, she's helping paint

and she helps with all the animals

so that will make the house mean a lot more to her.

Because you are a mess.

A few months later, with winter approaching,

I discover there's good and bad news at Coulton Mill.

-Hello!

-How are you?

-I'm fine.

-How lovely to see you again.

-You, too.

-Absolutely fantastic.

'Outside, they've made an extraordinary discovery on their own doorstep.'

When we started to tidy up this area

after the builders had piled up all that stuff to put the drains in,

they actually uncovered these cobbles here so this is the original path that was in front of the house.

It's beautiful, isn't it? It's absolutely wonderful.

More than likely it runs from here all the way down.

-Are you going to try and uncover it?

-Well, watch this space.

-That will be so wonderful, won't it?

-That's my goal. We'll see.

But with every exciting new development,

there's a sobering reminder of what they've taken on.

As they feared, the condition of the barn

they couldn't afford to repair earlier in the year

is now causing real concern.

We're hoping to get some emergency repairs done before the winter

because if we have a snowfall like last winter, the roof will collapse.

There's, like, a big hole there and it's already started caving in.

You can see it's lost a lot of tiles up there.

They won't know about the funding to help with the barns until the New Year.

They need to spend money now, or risk spending much more

if the barn roof collapses.

Every month we have money go in,

about the second week it all goes back out

so it's difficult at the moment.

Some would see picturesque barns like these

as prime candidates for conversion into holiday homes.

Not Heather. She's counting on them to house more of the farm animals

she likes to collect while Nick's away.

-Tell me what you've got.

-Is Nick going to find out about this?

Not...yet.

We have Pansy the goat

-who came with Sammy.

-The Shetland?

-The very fat Shetland pony,

and then I have the 13 ewes that are in the fields

and then five pigs.

I've got Gloria, Penelope, Big Piggy then Cabbage and Wilbur

and Cabbage is going to be sausages very soon

and Wilbur is our boar who is a typical man,

he never escapes because he just knows we bring the food to him.

But Wilbur is about to blot his copybook...

SHE RATTLES SWILL

-This is Sammy.

-Sammy!

'And I'm about to discover feeding the growing menagerie at Coulton Mill

'can be chaotic, to say the least.'

Everybody's coming!

Hello, big, fat pony!

-Oh, no. Pigs are out!

-Oh, cripes.

Instead of being in the field, the pigs have got on to the road...

Penelope...

-..and prize boar Wilbur - who

-never

-escapes -

needs to be wrangled towards his food.

OK, his bottom's in.

Oh, no - there's the other one.

That's Gloria. Oh, dear.

That's really embarrassing.

'Later, Nick calls from Afghanistan on his satellite phone.'

'I try to explain how the day's gone.'

I'd like to tell you that the pigs haven't been out and about today on the road.

I'd like to tell you that, but I'm afraid I can't.

There's livestock everywhere, Nick.

HE LAUGHS

Are you missing it?

Bless your heart.

But the worst news for Nick and Heather

lies right next-door, at the mill.

Now there's an even bigger worry than the rotting waterwheel.

Heather, the wheel is very, very beautiful,

but it's looking... This whole area is looking a bit more derelict

-than when I was last here.

-It is. I mean it's quite critical.

The wheel is one thing, but that's wood

and you can rebuild the wheel.

-It's the wall that we're most worried about.

-Are you?

-It looks so solid.

-But it's not.

-Is it in danger of coming down then?

-It could be, yeah.

An investigation by stonemasons

has revealed that decades of silt in the foundations

have steadily weakened the wall's fabric.

It's a potentially catastrophic development that threatens the whole mill,

but also at risk is physical evidence

of a site that's been pivotal to the community for generations.

In archives at the University Of York,

historian Kate Williams finds evidence that Coulton's millers

continued to prosper in the early 1800s.

What I've got here is a will in 1811 by John Pearson of Coulton Mill.

He's busy disposing his goods between his children.

He gives £150 - quite a significant sum - to one son.

And this was quite a profitable time to be a miller,

particularly at the moment in the middle of the Napoleonic wars,

there are no imports into Britain of food.

There were blockades because of the war with France

so the price of wheat was absolutely soaring.

Flour's expensive and there were riots about bread

and this is something that millers were making huge amount of money from

and clearly it's done well for John Pearson.

After John Pearson's death, the mill passed to his son, George.

And the earliest known pictures of Nick and Heather's building

come from the time when the Pearsons were millers.

Architectural expert Kieran Long

has found the book of early 19th-century countryside sketches

by Yorkshire artist George Nicholson.

It's very exciting for us to see

that he was at Coulton Mill on August 15th, 1823.

In this drawing here we have a beautiful rendition

of the mill pond, which, of course, we can't see today,

so that's incredibly valuable to us.

With the bank here, kind of, fronded with grass, and then,

of course, there's a lot of attention paid to the wheel itself.

That very distinctive structure is represented here.

We wish that some of the mechanisms were in the state they were in here,

200 years ago we could still see that wheel turning, but nonetheless

there's so much atmosphere here that still remains at Coulton Mill.

And then of course the miller here standing at the doorway.

I'm imagining that this is the gentleman

who is responsible for the mill in the 1820s.

Other than the wheel in perfect working order and so on,

this could be Heather standing outside the front door

of the building today, not much has changed.

But this idyllic 1823 sketch

captures a rural industry whose days were numbered.

Over the coming decades, the flour milling that had made Coulton

the heart of its community for centuries

would increasingly be done elsewhere.

At places like this -

Caudwell's Mill in Derbyshire.

There's no pretty wooden watermill here -

the power comes from an underfloor water turbine.

The population in this country has exploded throughout the 19th century

to a point where, you know, the kind of picturesque mills

like Coulton just couldn't handle the job and, of course,

this was the result - these incredible machines

to produce large-scale amounts of flour that can feed a huge population.

No longer is it efficient to mill a tonne a day

in sometimes quite out-of-the-way places in the countryside -

you can come to a place here and do ten tonnes in a day.

It's a completely different kind of economy.

The defining thing about Coulton Mill

and these small waterwheel-driven mills

is they have an intimate connection with one family who ran them,

the miller and his family living next-door

to a house-like thing with a couple of big millstones in it.

This is much more like a place of work, an industrial place.

The character of this place says factory much more

than the, kind of, cottage industry of mills like Coulton.

This is the last family to mill at Coulton - the Harrisons -

who took over in 1881.

Against the odds, they kept Coulton's waterwheel turning

until well into the 20th century.

Gillian Smith, nee Harrison, was born at Coulton Mill in the 1940s.

This is a picture in the actual mill house

of my grandfather, my mum, and my uncle

sitting in among the sacks of grain, or flour perhaps.

Apparently my grandfather

was one of the first people to get a car in that area

and he used to take family members for rides.

Gillian remembers the house in the last years of its prime.

It was very, very tidy outside,

there was a white picket fence

round the garden at the front, by the front door.

And then over the years

it seemed to lose its pristine appearance

and it's such a shame to see a place like that deteriorate.

Another winter starts to bite at Coulton Mill.

Nick, home from Afghanistan, checks the mill's wall

that's in danger of collapse.

The gable end of the wall could fall down,

and if that does, it's a deck of cards.

If part of the building collapses, it's not what anyone wants,

particularly when you've put everything you've got into it and it's your family's home.

The old wheel still sits in water that they can't get to drain away.

It's all looking pretty grim...

..but a few weeks later, Natural England get in touch.

We've had some really good news - well, extremely good news,

it's like Christmas, what, in the middle of February -

we did get funding to restore all of the outbuildings and also the mill.

There's a grant of £50,000 for the mill,

which means they can restore the waterwheel

and repair the collapsing wall.

And Natural England will contribute 80% of the cost

of saving and restoring the two barns.

Getting the funding is a massive breakthrough.

It's a great feeling knowing that we're going to restore the wheel.

It's really exciting knowing that that is part of history that's

actually going to be working again for further generations to see.

Buoyed up by the grant,

Heather decides to begin getting Coulton Mill back on the map.

Today is National Mills open weekend

and mills all over the country are opening to the public and so,

obviously, we have a mill and so we decided to open it.

It's a chance for us to show people what type of work

we are going to actually start doing on the mill.

-That waterwheel turning turns this wheel.

-Oh, cool.

Because the gearing system is so rare

they want to actually preserve that as opposed to restore it.

-Will you be living here?

-Oh, yes - we live in the house.

With a steady flow of locals - and tea -

Nick and Heather were overwhelmed by the reception,

but the guest of honour was the last miller's son, Simon Harrison.

You know, I never lived here. My dad did. Just even seeing the little walls built, you know,

you can start imagining what it was like in his day.

We know now that it's not going to fall down,

it's not going to get any worse and it's only going to improve.

I think it's a fantastic landmark now. He'd have been over the moon with this.

Having let the locals know their plans for the future of the mill,

it's time for Kate and Kieran to fill Nick and Heather in

on everything we've learnt about its past.

That was so amazing to me that we can find a document

charting its sale going right back to the 13th century.

The physical presence of that

is a physical link to the people who actually wrote it.

Practical knowledge of the miller was a century ahead

of the scientific knowledge of the Royal Society.

He knew it was faster, he knew it was better.

We found an extraordinary book of sketches

of which one was often Coulton Mill,

of an artist who went around the countryside

recording vernacular farm buildings.

-These people are probably...

-Workers.

Well, or the Pearsons themselves.

I think to live in a place like that with all of that behind you,

that history behind you, it's a huge responsibility, firstly,

and also just to make sure that you preserve that for the next 700 years.

Generations of millers have left their mark at Coulton Mill,

but now, after years of decay, it's time for me to find out

if it's ready for a new chapter -

as a family home to Heather, Nick, Sybilla and their animals.

It feels like a proper little farmyard now.

-It's alive again.

-It is alive again, isn't it?

It was quite still for a long time

and actually, probably for the first time in its history,

but now it's back again being what it always was.

-It also sounds very different now from when I first came here.

-Dogs barking.

Dogs, sheep, cockerels, the pigs are making a noise -

it sounds alive, the place, doesn't it?

It's going to become more and more alive. I mean, you can see them starting stabilising the buildings,

so once those are up and running then it's fair game for the animals.

I'm really hoping that there might be something

different in the house when I come in and have a look.

Well, wait till you see it. We are really excited about it.

Oh, good, well, so am I. Let's have a look.

They started with a building consumed by damp

and carpeted in mould.

Living amongst this restoration was a constant battle,

so how does the inside of Coulton Mill look today?

Oh, this is beautiful, Heather.

'They have transformed the old miller's parlour

'into a stately family dining room,

'in stark contrast to the bustling farmyard outside.'

It's a finished, living space. How do you feel to be in here?

It's wonderful. I mean, I still remember

trying to come through the front door with wellies on

wading through the mud to get to the kitchen

and to actually have heating...

We walk around in socks, most of the time.

'By using earthy colours and natural materials

'the decor is unmistakably rooted in the mill's rural setting.'

It's almost like being in the apple orchard.

Well, they're all our trees.

-These are paintings of your trees?

-Yes.

So each painting takes a year to do.

It's the tree itself and then the apples from that tree and blossom.

It's three seasons throughout the year.

There are times in the last few days

I've just sat and looked at the place

and just thought, actually, we've done what we wanted to.

It's not often you can say that, really.

'Out of respect for the building's history,

'Nick and Heather made a commitment to local craftsmen

'and local materials throughout the house.'

The detail of the work, the quality of the workmanship.

Beautiful stone that you've used,

the wood that you've used throughout the house.

I think you've done fantastically well.

It's interesting working with people who are craftspeople

who love what they do and are very proud of their own work

and once you get an affinity with people like that

then quite often they will go the extra mile to try and help you

because they understand you're trying to achieve the same objectives.

When they first moved to the house, the room that would be Sybilla's

on the first floor was in a critical condition.

The ceiling had collapsed and it looked as if it would never be homely again.

Today, it's a peaceful space where she can play with her toys

and briefly NOT be covered in mud.

Downstairs, the room that was planned to be the family sitting room

was in an even worse condition than Sybilla's bedroom.

Sitting in water, with crumbling walls,

this was a room far removed from their dream of a warm, dry sanctuary

that they could enjoy as a family.

Oh.

Your beautiful sitting room.

I get a very real sense that this

is starting to feel like a real family home.

It's just been a massive switchover from all of the mess

to where we can actually just sit down.

I can actually read stories to her in this room

without having dust flying everywhere.

Do you feel like you are almost part of the land and the house here?

Everyone has put their own mark on the place.

I mean, for almost 1,000 years,

all of the millers that have been here and their families

and the animals - they've all added their own mark to the place.

Do you see your future very much here?

I'm not going anywhere. HE LAUGHS

I am not going anywhere. I'm not living in a building site again.

No, I'm staying right here.

So you'll be here for as long as you can imagine?

Well, when the barns are finished then getting some cows, then...

-You never know.

-Oh, Nick...

Livestock aside, they had budgeted £50,000

to make the mill house a home.

So far they've spent £60,000,

which has saved the house and given them a series of comfortable rooms.

But this project has been about saving more than a home.

Nick has just planted a huge apple orchard

featuring a mix of rare Yorkshire varieties

that will take years to mature, but it's the grant

that will enable them to give this site a real future,

not just for them, but also for the wider public.

How much money have you managed to get from Natural England?

We're able to access up to £200,000.

We will pay a percentage of that and it's spread over a number of years.

It requires us to be able to have education access

and be able to have a wider public access.

And you're happy to do that, aren't you? That's always been part of your plan?

-Oh, quite happily, yeah.

-It would be totally wrong, really,

to try to seal all of this place off

and not let people experience it as they've always done

because that's what it always was -

it's always been for a wider community and we're delighted to be part of that.

It must be quite exciting, actually, to meet people

that are as excited by this group of buildings as you are.

One of the building team we've got was looking at the mortar from the barn

and explaining that it was mainly mud as well as a little bit of lime, which is quite unique to the area

and when you know you've got someone around you who's really excited

about mud and mortar then you know they are quite passionate about what they're doing.

They're going to take it seriously.

Heather, do you really believe that that wheel will turn again?

Well, according to the management plan,

it is possible that the mill will turn again.

It would be amazing, wouldn't it,

to come down the road into the valley and to hear the water.

Wouldn't that be amazing? Do you think that will happen?

-It will, yes. Definitely.

-I'd love to see that.

Nick and Heather have transformed a crumbling, damp wreck

into a wonderful family home,

but more than that, they've transformed this entire valley -

it's now alive with the sound of Heather's growing menagerie of pigs,

her chickens and her sheep, and more than that

they have managed to secure funding for the mill wheel.

They are in the memory of the millers that came before,

keeping alive centuries of tradition.

This has been much more than a restoration of bricks and mortar -

this has been about saving a disappearing way of life.