Quern

A quern is an object made of hard stone that was used to grind grain into flour. A rough but hard stone was necessary, to avoid grit in the flour. Lava was widely traded for the purpose. Querns have been used since the Neolithic period and have taken a variety of forms. Some querns, the beehive and rotary types, consisted of the grain being placed between two stones, the overlying stone is then hand rotated over the underlying stone. Another type of quern was the saddle quern, which was a large underlying stone with a concave top into which the grain was put, a smaller, rubbing stone, was then pushed back and forth over the grain. A Middle Iron Age quern fragment was found in Foscott Pit; a Roman one in a sand pit at Stone and a medieval quern was found on the Main Road at Drayton Parslow.