Donkey wheel
Category
Machinery and industrial devices
Date
1586 - 1587
Materials
Wood
Measurements
600 cm (Diameter)
Order this imageCollection
Greys Court, Oxfordshire
NT 198019
Caption
This enormous structure is a Tudor donkey wheel, a wonderful survival from the age of animal-powered machines. It sits over a medieval well, dug approximately 55 metres deep into the Oxfordshire chalk. As a donkey paced over the elm boards inside the vertical treadwheel, the water was slowly hoisted in large buckets from the well up to a tank on the roof. There, the bucket caught on a hook, which emptied the water into the tank for the household’s use. Animal and human-powered machines were common before the industrial age, when they were replaced with machines powered by water, wind, steam and electricity. This is the largest surviving donkey wheel in Britain and was built in 1586–7. It was still in use in the early 20th century. A smaller working example from the same period can be seen at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, where visitors can still enjoy short demonstrations by the castle donkeys. Another, later example is preserved at the National Trust’s Saddlescombe Farm in Sussex.
Summary
Wooden donkey wheel, approximately 6 metres diameter. The tread wheel is mounted on a large timber shaft, dressed to an octagonal section where the wheel is mounted. The spokes are arrangement with gaps large enough to admit the donkey and each spoke appears to be formed from a single piece of timber. These are fixed with wedges and spikes.
Full description
Animal-powered machines convert the effort of animals into rotary power. By treading a series of boards on the circumference of a circle, the rim transmits the motion to the centre of the wheel, turning the shafts. The machine is known as a donkey wheel or treadwheel when the animal or man is on the inside of the rim, but a treadmill when they work on the outside of the wheel. Treadwheels were used in mining and building contexts to raise water, men and minerals, as well as in domestic settings on country estates. Many of the Gothic cathedrals of Europe were built with materials raised by a treadwheel and in England treadwheels were used to raise water from wells from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. Treadwheels above wells may have been more common in the chalk upland areas of south-eastern England, where wells needed to be deep. This donkey wheel mechanism, erected in the 1580s, is extremely significant and the largest known British example to survive. The vertical treadwheel was one of the first mechanical devices illustrated in the first printed mechanical textbooks, including Agricola’s De Re Metallica of 1556. This wheel was constructed only thirty years later; dendrochronological sampling of the roof timbers suggested timber-felling in the summer of 1586 and winter of 1586-87. As Christina Hardyment describes in A History of Domestic Arrangements (1992), the donkey paced along the boards, the wheel hoisted buckets out of the water to a tank in the roof. As the empty bucket descended, the other rose full. The mechanism for emptying the buckets, although not original, comprises two iron hooks (one per bucket). A hook catches the full bucket and empties it into the water tank. The brake is applied to halt the bucket rising further and the donkey would be turned around, to move the wheel in the opposite direction and raise the second bucket. Water was channelled from the tank along wooden gutters into the house
Provenance
Transferred to the National Trust by Sir Felix and Lady Elizabeth Brunner with Greys Court House and Estate, 1969.