The burn by the old watermill

This is the sound of the small burn that runs past the restored Watermill near the Croft House Museum. In Shetland many people at one time had access to a small watermill, where they could grind down grains using the power of the water in the vicinity. Water was diverted into the mill via a series of stone waterways, and diverted away again when not in use, in order to preserve the paddles inside. There is an old Shetland superstition which involved throwing a ball of yarn into an old watermill on Halloween in order to hear the voice of one's future husband - [taken from the Tobar an Dualchais site: On Halloween a girl would take a ball of wirsit [worsted yarn] to an old watermill and throw it down the lum [chimney]. She would wind the ball back up and as it reached the end she would ask, "Wha haad's my clew [ball of wool] end?" Then she would hear the voice of her future husband speaking.] To make this recording, I set my EDIROL R-09 into the stone wall of the watermill, which is right beside a very lively burn. You can hear the water running through very clearly, an approximation of the same sound which attended women practising this old Halloween custom, and the grinding of grain in former times, in Shetland.