When you buy a mill, you buy more than just a physical structure. You buy history. You buy heritage. You buy the responsibility to care for something that predates your existence by a thousand years. You are but a speck in the life of a water mill that has ground corn since Alfred the Great was king of England.

I was, at first, oblivious to these obligations when I set sight on this derelict mill in the eccentrically named village of Nether Wallop in southern England. The burbling Wallop Brook, a chalkstream, flowed around, under and beside the mill. Doors were rotting; windows broken; floors precarious. The wheel itself was wedged against the wall of the milling room, dislodged from its axle. For reasons of impulse rather than commonsense I took it upon myself to call this place home and restore it to something it might once have been, discovering along the way the genius of my predecessors, and divining the quirks of a building that by any modern metric should never have been built.

What I did not appreciate then, is that when you live by a stream you share it with a community. Not a community of people, but rather the community of Mother Nature. In every moment, there is some creature – a lithe otter, a wily brown trout, a tiny mayfly, a darting kingfisher or a flitting bat – living its life in the place you call home. In a legal sense I own The Mill but really it belongs to them. This book charts a year of living among them – the beauty of observing nature’s rhythms, and the quiet labours, triumphs and tribulations of life in a mill.