Orkney, Scotland. Days 26, 24th July.
“Welcome to Evil Village. Please drive carefully.”
The two young couples thought they were making good time when their car shuddered to a halt as they were passing the village. They went to seek assistance at a nearby house and the front door was open so they went in. There was hardly any furniture and the rooms seemed to belong to a bygone age. Then they heard the front door closing and locking behind them. It was getting darker. The strange noises were getting closer….
No, hold on, it’s not Evil Village and we’re not in a Hammer horror movie from the 70s. It’s Evie village in a rustic corner of Orkney where the locals are likely to be friendly and bad things are unlikely to happen to strangers. The next three images are in Evie Village.
My accommodation wasn’t far away but I wasn’t staying here. Probably quite cheap budget accommodation though, with light and airy rooms.
Here’s another potentially fetching place to stay, still with the original slate roof. Very conveniently right on the main road. Maybe I should be starting a real estate blog.
A group of farm buildings beside the road, some maybe hundreds of years old, including the shed above.
A few miles away, here is the signpost to the click mill, with a picturesque ruined farmhouse behind it. In Orkney and in Northern Scotland generally, ruins like this are fairly common.
This is the click mill. It is a horizontal click mill, so called because the blades the water turns to drive the grinding are horizontal. It dates from the early 1820s, was last in use in the 1880s, and was renovated in 1932. The flour it produced would only have supported a couple of families at most.
The door is the opening at the left. Water from the stream the mill sits beside was diverted behind the mill and came out through the chamber at the right.
Inside the mill, here is the grinding mechanism and in front of it a large wooden box to collect the ground flour.
Underneath the grinding mechanism, this is where the water comes through to turn the horizontal blades and grind the grain.
The cereal most commonly used in this click mill would have been bere, a type of barley with four rows of grains instead of the usual two.
The term “click mill” comes from the projecting peg where the grain comes down from the feeder, that clicks away a little at a time to feed a small continuous amount of grain into the central hole of the grinding disk.
Murray Foote 
I liked the real estate theme! I hope your eventual accommodations were somewhat more comfortable than the buildings shown, although the white building in the first photo might be suitable.
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Thanks very much! I had great accommodation not far away, comfortable, very friendly & sociable and great food.
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Hello Murray
I am very interested in your Click Mill article from 2014, which I have just discovered. I have one in my garden here at Friary – a medieval one, but little left of it except the stonework underground.
Could you please explain one part of your narrative. You say ‘The door is the opening at the left. Water from the stream the mill sits beside was diverted behind it and came out through the chamber at the right.’
However, I do not see any ‘door’ nor can I see why water would be diverted ‘behind it’ (behind a door??) even if there was one. Perhaps it is the sentence construction. I would be very grateful if you could clarify what you mean here. I am trying to work out the configuration of the click mill foundations that I have here.
Thank you very much for any help you can give.
With best wishes
Penny Williamson
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Hello Penny
I visited here ten years ago so my memory is mainly embedded in this page. However, looking at the diagram at the bottom in conjunction with the image connected to those comments, it becomes clearer. The small opening on the left is the door, a crawlway into the mill. I surmise it was so small to help keep the interior of the mill and the flour dry. The diagram shows the ground was originally closer to this door.
When I say water was diverted behind it, I am referring to the mill, not the door. In the image you can see where the stream would flow in front of it. The water from the stream would have been diverted to flow under the mill and out the opening on the right. This drove the horizontal blades and the mill itself was sealed off above.
I have also discovered that the mill was built in the early 1820s and was operational until the 1880s. I will edit the post.
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All clear now Murray – and I found another article on the internet about the same place.
I am so grateful to you. It has greatly helped with figuring out how things worked here.
Best wishes.
Penny
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Glad to be able to help Penny.
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