It has just released a draft management plan for the mill that it bought as the New Zealand Historic Places Trust in 1977 and, with Totara Estate, is one of two major heritage agricultural sites it owns in North Otago.
The aim of the plan is to protect, preserve and conserve the heritage values through future management of Clarks Mill, and it makes major recommendations including some demolitions, additions and alterations to take it back to where it was in 1949.
The two-volume report plus appendices is a draft at present, with the public being asked to make comments by July 2. These will be considered when Heritage NZ makes final decisions.
In the report, which covers the property as a whole including all its individual structures and the mill dam and race from the Kakanui River under State Highway 1, are policies for conserving identified heritage values and recommendations for long-term management.
It does not cover the mill machinery; a separate management report is proposed for that.
Clarks Mill was built by Mathew Holmes and Henry Campbell in 1865-66 and was subsequently owned by several companies, the Clark family becoming involved in 1901.
It 1977, the family sold it to Northern Roller Milling Company, which transferred the flour quota north. Offered for auction, it was bought by the trust.
In the almost 150 years since it was built, the mill and its site have undergone many alterations, additions and demolitions.
Still existing are the mill building, miller's house, Smokey Joe's (accommodation and offices at various stages), office-workshop, sheds, mill race, three silos, weighbridge, weighing office, truck washdown and railway siding.
The mill building has the original 1866 mill and oatmeal house and an 1872 attached corrugated-iron store.
However, what the mill signifies now was confused by inconsistencies arising from the trust's restoration of the mill building's exterior in the 1980s, which saw some ''significant and substantial'' post-1906 additions demolished but others not restored, the draft plan said.
The interior and, particularly, the machinery were predominantly representative of 1977, producing a mismatch between the interior and exterior.
The report looked at three options - keeping the buildings as they are now and accepting inconsistencies and discrepancies; completing and correcting the exterior of the mill to 1906; or drawing the site together to the period after its last major refurbishment of mill machinery in 1949, when the site was in its heyday and had electricity.
The plan recommends the third option.
It also lists a large amount of work to meet that recommendation, including sprinklers to protect against fire, restoration of the water race to working order with water turbines generating electricity, replication of the missing spillway and fluming, adoption of a cyclical maintenance programme, structural surveys of some buildings to even adopting consistent floorboard timber, and checking the cliff behind the mill every six months to guard against rock falls.
