A letter sent to Mr. Leslie A.Evans,commenting on his recent published book The Story of Baglan.

The letter was written by Mr. Elwant E Jones who was born in 1895 and lived in the house next door to the Clay Mill Baglan.

Mr.Evans,
I knew many of the people mentioned in your book and a couple of errors.My house is a few yards from the stonework which you describe on page 26 as an old lime kiln.There is no lime or limestone near it except what is in the mortar
that built it.
A kiln is an oven  where things are baked or burnt,and that building has never been a kiln because it is the stonework of the ingenious clay mill and may be the only one in Wales.
As a boy I played around it and jumped in and out of the funnel shaped container which was half full of dried leaves.A man named William Asher who would be about 100 years now if he lived told me that when he was a boy he used to 
bring the pony down from the fields above to drive the clay mill.
This mill worked the same as the coffee bean mill my mother used when I went to school.
There was also a water wheel which I remember at the side of clay mill cottage before it became a dwelling house.The wheel may have driven machines inside either for brickmaking or pottery.The water which was the driving power came
from the Baglan brook and diverted by a stone built junction about six feet square.
By lifting a wooden sluice door letting the water in a channel below,which is about four feet below the surface covered with flagstones and is five feet deep and five feet wide,part of this is still under the back of my house and I 
have walked in it standing up.
The water having done its work flowed back into the pill and out to the sea.There were two sluice doors in the junction box and we boys used to close the two and let it fill up to bathe in it.
I am just writing this to pass the time and records of the past should be correct.I enclose a rough sketch of the stonework showing how it worked.

Yours Truly
Elwant E Jones
born 1895

The Story of Baglan by A.Leslie Evans
Jan.1970.

The letter was most likley written in 1978 by date on the drawing with it.?