I would like to welcome Ros Plunkett as our new newsletter editor and know that you will all wish to thank her for taking over the editorship from Sheila, who has produced our Newsletters over the past five years. I know we have all learnt a lot from reading them; Sheila will certainly be a hard act to follow.  We wish her well in the future.

Sharing news and knowledge is the key to a successful newsletter so please keep the news articles and photos coming especially on Hampshire mills to Ros, so she can share them with us all.

I am just sorting out the final details for our trip to Devon over Mills Open Day weekend 9th to11th May 2014.

There is plenty of water in the rivers for milling.  Both Winchester City Mill and Eling Tide mill have suffered with ingress of water. Eling has not been able to mill for several weeks!

In the second week in February I attended an English Heritage Workshop in Winchester on ‘The Characterisation and Local Listing’ using the Oxford Character Assessment Toolkit. This Toolkit has been prepared for you to assess the character of areas within the city.

Whether you are planning a new development, or a community group who want to be involved in planning the future of your area, you can use the toolkit to record the features that give your part of your area its sense of place, as well as the issues to be addressed in future.  This a useful framework to record the heritage of an area to enable documentation for local listing, applications to heritage lottery for funding and objections to planning applications on local heritage issues. For further details

http://www.oxford.gov.uk/PageRender/decP/CharacterAppraisalToolkit.htm