Gin gang

A gin gang, wheelhouse, roundhouse or horse-engine house is a structure built to enclose a horse engine, usually circular but sometimes square or octagonal, attached to a threshing barn.

The gin (short for "engine") was the motive power driving a small threshing machine, and the horse did the gang, or going.

This arrangement was necessary in locations where there was no power for a water wheel,[2] hence in Wales and Ireland there is evidence of fewer gin gangs.

Building materials include thatch in Sussex, pantiles in North Yorkshire, stone tiles and sandstone in Northumberland, granite pillars in Devon, wooden poles and flint in Norfolk, weatherboarding in Berkshire, brick in the East Riding of Yorkshire, white Magnesian Limestone in West Yorkshire, ironstone in Bedfordshire, and one instance of hexagonal ashlar pillars salvaged from Finchale Priory in Finchale, County Durham.

Gin gangs were required to shelter the wooden gears, and not to protect the horse; hence in some places there is evidence of horse−walks or open−air horse−powered threshing machines instead.

As a result of this, in the 1970s Scotland still had 150 gin gangs, North East England had 800 and Cornwall had 100 remaining, but Wiltshire and Berkshire had 8 between them.

Conversely, the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815 created a dearth of labour and a corresponding demand for gin gangs in Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset.

[3] No gin gang remains in operation commercially; the known examples outside museums are either derelict or have been renovated as barn conversions.

Scottish examples survive at St Quivox, South Ayrshire,[7] at Dunbar, East Lothian,[8] and at Carsegour, Kinross,[9] but the one at Westruther, Westertown in Berwickshire appears to have been destroyed since 1974.

[22][23] A barn conversion development, from a group of farm buildings known as a steading including an octagonal gin gang, was completed in 2010 at Longhorsley, Northumberland.

Home Farm at the Beamish Museum, County Durham, contains an early 19th-century, semi-octagonal gin gang with sandstone or millstone grit walls and slate roof.