Tucking Mill

From 1798 until 1810 Tucking Mill was the home of William Smith, an English geologist, credited with creating the first nationwide geological map.[3] He is known as the "Father of English Geology" for collating the geological history of England and Wales into a single record. He worked on the Somerset coalfield and the Somerset Coal Canal. There is a plaque on Tucking Mill Cottage saying that it was Smith's home, which was erected in 1888, on the mill which was demolished in 1927, and the tablet was mislaid. When the plaque was rediscovered in the 1930s the Geological Society of London and the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution placed it on the 18th-century cottage.[4][5] However, it is now believed that he actually lived in the nearby Tucking Mill House.[6][7][8] During his occupation he built a small railway to transport stone from a quarry at Kingham Field, Combe Down to the canal.[9]

From 1883 until the end of World War II it was the site of a fuller's earth factory. George Dames and his brother Charles Richard Dames set up a mine in Horsecombe Vale. At the bottom of the valley was the pan grinding works where water from Horsecombe Brook was used to make a slurry from which sand settled at the bottom of troughs. The slurry then passed through an earthenware pipe to Tucking Mill, where a second stage of sedimentation took place in large troughs where it settled for up to 30 days. Once the water had been drained by sluices the damp caked earth was carried in wooden trams to kilns where it was dried for three to four days. The product was used in the oil refining and pharmaceutical industries. The original uses in woollen production no longer used fuller's earth. A railway siding at Midford railway station was built specifically to load fuller's earth.[10]

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  The cottage at Tucking Mill which has a plaque saying that William Smith lived there
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  The house William Smith actually lived in