Tide mill

[5][6] In England, an exceptionally well preserved tidal mill, dated by dendrochronology to the late 7th century (691-2AD) was excavated in the Ebbsfleet Valley (a minor tributary of the River Thames) in Kent during construction of the Ebbsfleet International Station, on the High Speed 1 railway line[7] The earliest recorded tide mills in England are listed in the Domesday Book (1086).

At one time there were 750 tide mills operating along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean: approximately 300 in North America,[9][10] including many in colonial Boston over a 150-year span.

Of one at Beaulieu, H. J. Massingham wrote in the 1940s, Part of the mill is built on piles into the river and is weatherboarded, while the rest of the building is a warm red brick roofed with lozenge-shaped and rounded tiles which I believe are called fish-tiles.

All the interior is of wood – ladders, bins for the meal, floor-boarding, square pillars, beams, narrow passages, fittings, shaft rising to the first floor and all.

The point is that it has stood in this way for something like six centuries, and that gives the explorer into its dusky depths a more penetrating notion of how the old builders could build, more than does a Gothic church or even a cathedral.

The pulse and swing of the great wheel sets the whole building in an ague, but it will still be standing when all the flimsy excrescences of development between Beaulieu and Poole have fallen down.

Although hydroelectric power represents a source of renewable energy, each proposal tends to come under local opposition because of its likely adverse effect on coastal habitats.

A less intrusive design is a 1MW free-standing turbine, constructed in 2007 at Strangford Lough Narrows; this site is close to an historic tide mill.