There was no inscription on the building, and there is no existing architecture which could decide the date when Friarton Mill was built. Popular tradition, which always tends to the age of good Queen Bess, as if it had been golden and not iron in English annals, loosely attributed that date to the mill. Undoubtedly, it was so old that even its unsophisticated millers had grown proud and careful of its age, as a man who will ignore and trample upon his years at sixty, nay, at threescore and ten, will boast of them, and cherish them tenderly from eighty upwards. Everything about the mill, except the iron machinery which was kept out of sight, was white powdered or silvery grey, or rich brown, or toned in sage or olive green, dull crimson, and dusky orange by stonecrops and lichens, as no art-school design could tone colours. The building stood as near the water as an old Venetian palace is to its canal. The site must have been untenable in an English climate to any miller who was not proof against the chest complaints and rheumatisms that English flesh is heir to, had not the water which in floods lapped the mill walls been the flow just below the weir. It was always rapid in its current, thus carrying off a large proportion of its own vapour, never stagnated in pools, nor, even when there was least water, dried up in portions of its channel, throwing off unwholesome miasma in the process. Another protection to the miller and his family was, that his two-storied, stone-roofed, dwelling house, built at right angles to the mill, stood by the whole breadth of its court back from the water where the ground rose, and a natural drainage filtered away the damp in the soil. Actual evidence removed all reproach of slimy or mildewed unwholesomeness from Friarton Mill, or, for that matter, from the mansion-house of Copley Grange, which stood only a little farther from what was still called ‘the Brook,’ or ‘Buller’s Brook.’ No races of men or women in the parish had been, in the memory of the oldest Friarton man (and he was to be found in the Copley Grange Almshouses), stronger and longer-lived, in the main, than the two families which had for generations dwelt in the mill and the manor-house.