Folly Mill

Tucked away in a valley at Allgreave, a short way from Ludchurch, where the Tor brook meanders, there is a ruined paper mill with a strange story attached to it. A man named Abraham Day decided to build a mill in probably one of the most inaccessible places you could wish to find.

It would have been about 1790 when he built the mill in a beautiful wooded gorge at the foot of a rock face called Gibbons Cliff, in which a monkeys face can clearly be seen.

Gibbons Cliff

The Tor brook would have provided power for the mill, on the opposite side of the brook is Allgreave wood and on the mill side is Gibbons Cliff wood. According to tradition the first mill that Abraham built here was washed away in a flood, this also happened again after he went to the trouble of rebuilding it.

When he announced that he was going to rebuild it a third time his long suffering wife declared that she would go to bed and stay there, which she did until she died at the age of seventy six, probably from bed sores!

One of the resons it was called a folly was due to the fact that it is so inaccessible, the horse and carts which were used to deliver materials and transport the finished products out of the gorge would have found it very difficult.

Over the years there have been numerous sightings of the ghost of Abraham Day hard at work rebuilding his mill, an old man with a stubbly beard dressed in leather trousers and a grey vest. There have been other unusual sightings in this area of a large cat like animal which has been seen and strange footprints have been found in the vicinity of the ruined mill.