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Wood Mills and the Salmon Fishery

From The Muniment Room, a resource for social history, family history, and local history.

Manor of South Stoneham • South Stoneham House • Wood Mills • South Stoneham Farm • Swaythling village • Manors of Swaythling

Wood Mill, after its reconstruction following the fire in 1824.

Wood Mill, with the salmon pool and sluice in the foreground, pictured c.1900.

Wood Mills^[1] and the Wood Mills Salmon Fishery was a property at South Stoneham on the Stoneham Estate, comprising a pair of mills, Wood Mills Pool (salmon pool), and grounds called Horselease Close.

For centuries the property belonged to the Bishops of Winchester, and by right tended to be leased to the owner of the Manor of South Stoneham, often together with the Itchen Fishery.

There is a sequence of title deeds for the property in Bundle 21, with leases for three lives to: Anne Clerke (1641^[2]), William Clerke (1675^[3]), Alice Clarke (1685^[4]), Edward Fleming (1698^[5]), William Sloane (1741^[6], 1743^[7]), and Hans Sloane (1774^[8], 1792^[9]).

Edward Fleming was assigned a lease of Wood Mills from Edmund Pitman in November 1697^[10], and then took on a new lease from the Bishop of Winchester in February 1698^[11]. A few months later Edward assigned the lease to Edmund Dummer (d,1713), surveyor of His Majesty's Navy, who ten years later was to build South Stoneham House closeby^[12].

John Barton Willis Fleming acquired the property with the Manor of South Stoneham before 1819.

The Mill was completely destroyed by fire in 1824^[13].

When Queen Victoria visited Wood Mills in 1846, she disembarked from her barge by means of 'a relic of the old residence of the Flemings at Stoneham', an 'ancient yew staircase' fixed in the River Itchen to enable landing at any stage of the tide.

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