主播大秀

Mo McCloud, who's leading the restoration of Howsham Mill, says every single window has been smashed and the floor is littered with broken crockery and glass.

Instead of producing corn, which it did for much of its 190-years as a working mill, the building, a finalist in last year's 主播大秀 Restoration Village programme, is due to begin generating electricity for the first time.

"The whole project relies on the fact that we will produce enough electricity to sell back to the Grid to create an income for the building," said Mo MacLeod, who chairs the Renewable Heritage Trust, which was set up to rescue the 18th century mill.

One of the mill's Archimedean screws

It will begin modestly, simply providing power to the site.

In time, though, once it's able to hook up to the National Grid, it will generate enough electricity to run a village the size of Howsham.

"We'll be producing about 65 kilowatts which doesn't sound like a lot but that's 65 kilowatts constantly over the year which works out to be an awful lot of kilowatt hours," said Ms MacLeod.

Mo MacLeod

"Roughly speaking an average house will use one kilowatt constantly so that kind of shows you how much electricity we're doing and at current prices will give the project an income of around 拢30,000 a year which will pay for a warden to look after it and pay for ongoing maintenance."

The way it's generating that electricity is novel for the UK because Archimedean screws - modern turbines - are being used along with a water-wheel.

These turbines are fish-friendly and they need to be in the River Derwent because it's home to the Lamprey, a very small protected fish. The Archimedean screws have large water chambers and turn very slowly allowing fish, like the Lamprey, to swim through unharmed.

One of the turbines is in place now but another will be added as soon as funds are available.

John Adams

All this marks the end of phase one of the project which includes the restoration of a lower building, adjoining the main mill and known as the Granary, and which houses a kitchen, toilets and generating equipment, and of course, the water-wheel.

But to get even this far hasn't been straightforward. Red tape has led to delays and this summer the island was flooded for three weeks. And the rebuilding has been challenging.

"You go into the structure which looks pretty solid and then once you start going into it you find that it's far from solid so you finish up having to go into it a lot further, take a lot more down and hence then you've got to replace what you've taken down back to the same as it was before," said John Adams, one of the builders and stonemasons.

Even so, the project has come a long way since Mo MacLeod's husband, Dave Mann, a renewable energy consultant who's mad-keen on mills, took a break from house-hunting in 2003 to try and find the mill which he'd only seen marked on a map.

But it will be a while yet before the mill is able to open as an educational centre. Another 拢500,000 needs to be raised on top of the 拢450,000 already collected.

And so it could be five years before the main building is transformed into a classroom and library.

But with electricity generation now a reality the mill is well on course to a new lease of life for the 21st century. Not bad for a building which was nearly demolished in the 1960s.