The wind attracts. Behind a half -round window a wick swings past every second. Wheat grains flow via the shaking bak and the headhole between the mill stones. The top stone is running. The bottom is standing still. One floor lower falls flour in a bag, two hundred kilos per hour, eight bags of wheat. Wooden wheels with pens and combs, spindles, axes – everything rolls and rolls and vibrates and rumbles in the mill. You feel the brick tower shaking.
“The millstone must sing,” says Cornelis Dekker. “You need all your senses,” says William Bouter. “Listening, feeling, then you know exactly if you should adjust something. Then the mill itself says what it needs. That’s the best thing. “
This is Korenmolen de Lelie in Puttershoek, on the Oude Maas under Rotterdam. Jesse in ‘t Veld (29) is the regular miller of the Lelie, built in 1836 and now a national monument. Dekker (22) and Bouter (22) were joined this afternoon with a few fellow millers from the Hoekse Waard.
In the last century it seemed done. Baker’s flour came from a machine, animal feed became industrial compound feed. Many mills were wickless or demolished. But thanks to improving heritage awareness and a favorable subsidy climate, many mills have been restored since the 1980s. The 1,200 ‘grinding’ mills that the Netherlands has – Chord mills, polder mills that serve as a pumping station, and water mills that are driven by water – are often the property of local authorities and foundations.
Most are run by volunteers, including the miller. That craft is also going through a revival. Saturday received a record number of 110 new millers in Soest awarded their diplomaafter they have their education at it Gilde van Molenaars had completed.
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Historic machine
The majority still consists of somewhat older men with a lot of free time, but the mills attract more and more women and young people. Jesse in ‘t Veld, who works at a restoration company, obtained his diploma at the age of eighteen. But from the age of thirteen he had been “fond of that large, historic machine.” He was allowed to help in neighboring village of Maasdam, climb into the wicks to secure the sails, for example. “Purectors of your limits, that motivates that at that age.”
And he was caught by the touch of “mystery” around the miller. “Everyone knows him, but he is also a bit of a strange one, even at night when the wind blows, on that cold tower, because autumn and winter are the best seasons.”
Jesse Bergquist (19) from Roosendaal has been crazy about mills since he was eight, he says. “My mother is the city and country with me to watch mills.” Last year he obtained his diploma, but that was only because you are not allowed to take an exam before your eighteenth. He is in the last year of his Architecture Training and does an internship at the Heritage Inspector Monumentenwacht. Every free moment he is miller of the Arend, a flour mill from 1811 in Wouw.
If you get to know a mill, it becomes an extension of yourself. Then it is almost as if he lives
The training is considered tough. The MIO (Molenaar in training) must know the history and technology of the mill, but also weather and all kinds of safety requirements, plus 150 practical hours in all seasons and keeping a logbook. “But if you have been doing it from an early age, it is not difficult,” says Bergquist. “As a miller you have to know what you are doing, but there is also feeling. If you get to know a mill, it becomes an extension of yourself, as it were. Then it is almost as if he lives. “
The water mill of Elsloo in South Limburg is fed by a stream from a marl plateau. Always enough water, except for a lot of rain, the lock must open, says Molenaar Belinda Bakkes (49), clerk at the municipality of Maasgouw. Her girlfriend, Liesbeth Van Binnebeke (55), did the double miller’s training: wind and water. “The miller where Liesbeth followed practical lessons, said to me,” Here, try it “and then I was sold,” says Bakkes. Last weekend both women each received two diplomas. But they spend most of the time on ‘their’ mill with the wheel on the stream. “You don’t have to look at the air all the time either.”
Thin through the pants
Always an eye to the sky, says Cornelis Dekker in Puttershoek. His ‘own’ mill, De Windlust in Goudswaard, is from 1694 and the oldest in the region. “Before you start sailing, you always think: what do the clouds say, what does the barometer do? And then it can change in five minutes. “
If you are too late with a rapid change in the wind direction, the mill can suddenly start running the other way around and the ‘catch’ – a kind of drum brake in the hood – no longer works. “You have to control the mill, not the other way around,” says Wim van der Giesen, miller of the Good Hope in Mijnsheerenland. “You have to learn that, and the best learning school is that it went thin at least once thinly.”
All wheat that the lily processes is brought from Zeeland and brought to the mill by sailing cargo ship – the Tjalk Vrijbuiter – from Zeeland. None, or not just a tourist gimmick, but “a serious attempt to breathe new life into a fossiless chain of crafts,” says in ‘t Veld. He received a heritage prize for it last year. In a world where everything comes from far and everything has to be ‘now’, his mill is a resting point. And of course it helps that none of the new millers only have to live off the wind.
The last wheat has run through the grinding stones. In ‘t Veld, the blades stop, in the’ Little Rest ‘stand (Straight Cross). There is also a ‘great peace’ (Andreaskruis). But tomorrow he has to turn again.
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