We remain in Stradbrook this week, looking at the same location pictured looking back towards the village.

Our archive picture above, from Bratton historian Kathleen White, was taken around the start of the last century and shows the Milbourne stream as it was was used by farmers to wash their sheep, with a dam across the stream to enclose a bigger area of water.

The picture, which features Kathleen’s grandmother Mrs Couldrake, at the front of the left hand side holding her father Howard as a babe in arms, clearly shows the Stradbrook Mill in the background on the right.

The sheep wash is in a stream or brook fed by the Milbourne springs, referred to in early records as the Milbourne stream.

The stream is now called Stradbrook, the brook in the wide valley, after the Scottish word Strath.

The name Milbourne shows that in Saxon days there was a mill there and the name Milbourne, variously spelt as Mulbourne or Melbourne, was applied to the hamlet which grew along its banks. The stretch of the B3098 which runs down to the stream is called Melbourne Street today.

The mill would have been a flour mill belonging to the Lord of the Manor, where all the corn grown by his tenants was ground.

This area pictured was also where pilgrims from Canterbury set up camp for three days when on their pilgrimage across England and on to to Compostela in Spain. They were walking the length and breadth of the country, visiting every church named in honour of St James. They described the water at this site as the purest they had ever drunk and named it St Catherine’s Well.