Mills Now and Then: Stannergill/Castletown

About this recording

John O’Groats Mill joined mills across the country in celebrating National Mills Weekend 2026, held on 9–10 May. The weekend brought together local history and community memories of milling in Caithness.

As part of the event, John O’Groats Mill hosted a daytime Caithness Mills Reminiscence Session in collaboration with Nucleus: The Caithness Archive and Wick Voices. The day continued with an evening lecture series, “Mills Now and Then,” exploring the history, preservation, and continuing relevance of mills in Caithness.

This short lecture by local historian Muriel Murray traces the early history of milling in the Stannergill/Castletown area of Caithness showing how its fertile land, watercourses, and strategic coastal position made it an important milling and taxable landscape long before the better-known nineteenth-century mill associated with James Traill.

Drawing on old documents, probates, parish records, Kirk session minutes, land transfers, and maps, it follows references from the Norse-derived skat or skatland system in the twelfth century through successive ownership by the Cheyne, Keith, Oliphant, Sinclair, and Castlehill Estate families.

It explains how mills were central to land value and local economy, not only for processing grain but also for collecting dues such as knaveship, sequels, and bannock under the sucken or thirlage system.

The talk also highlights evidence for multiple mills around Garth, the east and west burns, and later Castlehill developments, concluding that Stannergill’s milling history is older, broader, and more complex than the surviving modern mill alone suggests.

Overall, the evidence presents Stannergill as a long-standing centre of agricultural, economic, and social life whose milling story deserves continued research and preservation.