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Waltham Chase Mill - Geography



The geography of the Bishop’s Waltham Moors & Waltham Chase Mill can be divided into the PHYSICAL and HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

The many springs at The Moors that feed into the millpond have been utilised in the past by man for the production of watercress. The larger springs were converted into shallow ponds for growing watercress as a commercial crop. The chalk streams of Hampshire are well suited to growing cress as the water is at a constant temperature of about 10 °C and is always flowing. Consequently the cress beds never freeze in cold winters. The commercial growing of watercress along Hampshire chalk streams still occurs today in the Meon, Itchen and Test valleys. At the Moors watercress production is thought to have stopped by about the 1940s. The 1910 Ordnance Survey Map shows five cress beds. The photograph is of Mr Pepler managing cress beds on the Moors in the 1920s (photograph provided by local historian John Bosworth). Click on the map below to find Mr Pepler in the watercress beds.

Map Supplied by Hampshire County CouncilWatercress Bed ------ Click to see Mr. Pepler in the cressbed.Watercress Bed ------ Click to see Mr. Pepler in the cressbed.

Earlier this century when Waltham Chase Mill was in operation, the millpond was much larger and was maintained by the miller and his staff. The picture below is of the millpond in the early 1900s taken from an old postcard.
Click here for video The sedge, and other marginal and aquatic plants would be regularly cut by hand from a punt to help prevent the pond from silting up. Since the closure of the mill in the 1950s, this practice has stopped and as a consequence the pond has become much-reduced in size and very shallow. In the summer of 2000 the pond was cleaned out using specialist equipment including a floating excavator.
Many more people worked on the land in the early part of the 1900s than today, with farms employing many seasonal workers. The picture below was taken of farm workers making hay in the millpond meadow in about 1910. Photograph provided by John Bosworth.

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