Silt jetting to clear the mill race exit

Woodbridge Tide Mill Museum is one of only two working sources of flour milled using centuries-old tide milling techniques and designs. There’s been a mill on the site for over 850 years.

Woodbridge Tide Mill Museum is acutely aware of its green credentials. Holder of a Suffolk Carbon Charter gold Award, the Mill has been producing clean energy from tidal power for centuries. It is also popular with wildlife on its mill pond and in mill race where food for wildlife is stirred up when the water is running from the wheel.

Woodbridge Tide Mill Charitable Trust has been granted permission from the Mill’s owner, Woodbridge Town Council and Natural England to jet away some of the silt that has recently built up in the mill race which takes water after it has powered the water wheel which drives the milling machinery, thus threatened the very future of water milling of flour.

The Trustees feel it is important to ‘keep the waterwheel turning’ so we are very grateful to the authorities that have allowed this. We know that, yet again, the Mill is buying time and the Charity’s Trustees are aware of, and will support, the wider need for more a much larger, longer lasting, and more expensive, silt clearance in the Deben near Woodbridge Riverside.

A full Question and Answer can be viewed and downloaded here