Tag: Millstone

Millstones or mill stones are used in windmills and watermills, including tide mills, for grinding wheat or other grains.
The type of stone most suitable for making millstones is a siliceous rock called burrstone (or buhrstone), an open-textured, porous but tough, fine-grained sandstone, or a silicified, fossiliferous limestone. In some sandstones, the cement is calcareous.
Millstones used in Britain were commonly of two types:
In Europe, a third type of millstone was used. These were uncommon in Britain, but not unknown.
In India, grinding stones (Chakki) were used to grind grains and spices. These consist of a stationary stone cylinder upon which a smaller stone cylinder rotates. Smaller ones, for household use, were operated by two people. Larger ones, for community or commercial use, used livestock to rotate the upper cylinder.
A runner stone is the upper of a pair of working millstones. The runner stone spins above the stationary bedstone creating the “scissoring” or grinding…