Y Felin

This unpretentious building in St Dogmaels, near Cardigan, is Y Felin (pronounced Uh Vellin). That, I well know, means The Mill as in Cornish it would be An Mellyn. The two languages really are quite similar. Indeed, I used to live a stones throw from Mellanvrane, in Cornwall – an anglicised rendering of Mellyn Vran, which means Crow Mill.

Mellanvrane is a mere shadow of its former self, but Y Felin is quite the opposite and rather special.  If you ring the doorbell of the adjacent house, Michael will emerge and (for a modest fee) show you around his beautifully restored mill.

There's another Cornish connection, for much of the restoration work was carried out by a gentleman by the name of Paynter.  "He must have been Cornish," says I, "for that's a good Cornish name," and indeed he was.

To begin our tour, Michael invited us to walk round to the back of the mill and view the water wheel, while he opened the sluice gate.

This is how it looked like after the sluice had been opened, but before the wheel mechanism had been set in motion. 

And here it is, in operation.

The mill pond, from which the water wheel is fed.

I'm delighted to report that Mr Paynter has done a fine job of restoration, as these photos from the Y Felin website site show
. 

I really should have taken a few photos of my own, but became totally engrossed in conversation with Michael about flour mills we have known and my dad's wartime work with Vickers Armstrong. I'm not at all sure how we got on the the latter, but it all made for a truly fascinating visit.

But what is Y Felin's product like?  Feeling the need to know, I bought a 1.5kg bag of wholemeal flour and put it to the test, pitting it against my regular Tesco Strong Wholemeal flour.

The Y Felin flour is on the left and the Tesco product on the right. There's not a lot of difference, though the Tesco one is slightly coarser and includes a few wheat husks. It would have been interesting to make a loaf with each flour but my Slimming World Healthy Eating Plan has severely limited my bread intake, so I just made one large loaf with Y Felin flour, using a bread maker and following my usual recipe:

310ml water, 15ml lemon juice,

450g wholemeal flour, 75g white flour,

20ml milk powder, 7.5ml salt, 10ml sugar,

25g butter, 7.5ml yeast.

Other recipes I've seen use a lot more sugar, but this one has never failed me in the past... and it didn't this time, either.  Here's the scrumptious result.

In this rather unscientific comparison, all I can say with certainty is that the Y Felin loaf is every bit as tasty as my usual Tesco ones — but who cares to support Tesco when one could buy flour that's been lovingly produced in an ancient mill that was restored by a Cornishman?