StoneLifter wrote:
Mechanical innovation is not unknown in Bolton - Vernon Kaye's Reciprocating Mouse Sprocket immediately comes to mind. Though the area is well known to local historians, through maps and deeds, there are no accounts of flour mills ever. Just the placename inference that there was a Saxon fulling mill on the riverbank (about a hundred yards from where tuesday grew up), which is a quarter mile downhill from where the fragment is now. When stones are being transported for walls and buildings, in the field, they are almost inevitably taken downhill. The invention of internal combustion changed that, of course.
Although you say there are no flour mills in the area they were definately cut and carved a few miles down the road from your stone, on top of Black Coppice where they lie strewn on the clifftop some finished some not.i personally believe your stone is an old carved gatepost nothing else i'd love it to be the real deal but its clearly not!
Toothells is looking interesting though i'll have to go take a closer look.
Peace
Tree
