K.H. Rogers, in Wiltshire And Somerset Woollen Mills, published by the Pasold Research Fund Ltd., in 1976, noted:
Crockerton: Shearwater Mill
This was a fulling mill by 1727, when it occurs in a list of mills at which medley cloths were to be inspected. In 1732 a lease was made to Edmund Tanner, yeoman, who in 1748 offered the mill, ‘the best for scouring in the kingdom’, with a handsome new-built house and lands for sale. The buyer was William Meares, a Horningsham clothier, to whom renewals of the lease were made in 1748 and 1764. At some subsequent date, John Barter obtained the lease by assignment from Meares’s creditors, and in 1791 he surrendered it in return for an annuity of £50. The parish was enclosed in that year, and the mill was probably bought in to avoid difficulties over water while the great ornamental lake at Shearwater was being made just up the valley. It stood idle for the best part of two years, but was worked by Peter Warren, a Warminster clothier, when water was available. The lake was filled in August 1793, but in the following year ‘the water in the great pond slackening soon after the repair’, very little was done, and at Michaelmas the mill was entirely stopped to water the meadows. In 1795, part of the water was recovered by boring under the great pond head, so that the mill could do some work as well as water the meadows. In 1798 an estimate was made for improving the mill by enlarging the wheel, which was then 8 ft. 8 in. in diameter. The millwright considered that the trunk shoot could be raised 1 and a half ft. and the ground at the mill tail lowered 5 and a half ft., and the mill being 16 ft. wide was large enough to take a new wheel. Warren continued to use the mill until 1810. No more is known of it, and it probably fell out of use on the collapse of the Warminster trade soon afterwards. It stood at the southern edge of the hamlet of Potters Hill.
A short distance below on the same stream another fulling mill once stood, but it had gone by 1745, when only its site, just west of the main road, was marked.
WRO, 845, lease books, estate papers, etc.;
SJ, 9.5.1748.