The derelict old mill stood deep in the marshes. Trees and marsh willows had grown up around it and the old track to it had long since disappeared beneath a tangled undergrowth. It was now a haven for wild life, the old bank on which it stood harbouring water rats and voles, and the remaining water ways were home to a variety of ducks and waterfowl. King fishers swooped along the waters edge with the iridescent flash of their wings, to swift to see, except when gone, leaving just an impression on the eye.

On moonlit nights the ghosts of the old millers revisit their ways of old. Their shadows can be seen, if there was anyone there to see them, moving with ethereal grace that they never had as mortals, up and down the walkway to the lower floor carrying large sacks of what might be grain, and then with a ghostly ‘Hoy’ start to raise them up on the hoist to the top floor. And so, as if in balletic dance they moved in unison with the visible but soundless movement of the great mill stones, and the windless wind that moved the outline of the sails to grind the grain down to flour.  And so they moved, and the old mill sighed, and bats weaved about as if to court the shadows of the millers of yore.

On a still night, when the harvest moon hung low in the sky, and lights could be seen flickering across the marshes, those with sharp ears could hear what might be a murmuring of ghostly voices, as if calling from the grave; a chuckle, a laugh that was drawn out a wail of anguish, a shushing, a girlish voice that sighed away, and that strange chant of ‘Hoy’.

On such nights local folks kept to their beds, but strangers drawn to the mysterious sounds might find a thin scattering of flour, picked up and swirled about by eddies of marsh gas which on some nights could take on the appearance of a miller before disappearing in a pale blue flame.

When this tale was told to the locals in the Old Pirate Inn they would smile in the enigmatic way of country folk and marsh men, and quaffing down their ale they would say, ‘Why, that just be grist for the Mill’, and pulling their old cloaks about them stare moodily into the fire.