The
River Wye in
Buckinghamshire is a river in England that rises in the
Chiltern Hills of
Buckinghamshire. It flows for around , through
High Wycombe on its way down to
Bourne End, where it meets the
River Thames on the reach above
Cookham Lock.
High Wycombe takes part of its name from the river, which now runs mostly underground through the town.
History
There is a long history of
water-mills being operated in the Wye Valley which drops about 200 feet in its 9 mile course. The
Domesday Book records eighteen of them in the nine miles between
West Wycombe and the
Thames.By the seventeenth century there were
fulling mills as well as
corn mills. A Court of Survey in 1627 lists six mills running upstream from the boundary with Wooburn Parish: the paper mill, Tredway, Loudwater, Bassetsbury, Chalfonts (Rye) and Bridge. There were by this time at least two
paper mills: Glory in
Wooburn Green and Hedge in
Loudwater. By 1636 another paper mill had been established in the parish of West Wycombe and by 1656 another at Marsh, below
Wycombe. At this time paper was made from rags and by the end of the eighteenth century more than 150 men were recorded as papermakers in the valley. In 1816 there were 32 paper mills (some of which also milled corn), four which only milled corn and one which was also a saw mill. This was...
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