Natural landscapes preferred for the location of past watermills and their predisposition to preserve cultural landscape enclaves

Abstract

This paper investigates the locations of past watermills in terms of their hydrological and geomorphological conditions. In our analysis, the natural landscape was treated as a resource of factors favouring or hindering the location of a specific mill and the possibility of their persistence as technological and economic conditions became increasingly unfavourable throughout history. An answer was provided to the question of which areas were environmentally preferable for the location of a plant using the energy of flowing water and in which types of landscape - enclaves of the cultural mill landscape were preserved for the longest time. The Maximum Entropy Method (MaxEnt) was used to determine the spatial probability distribution of the mill reservoir locations based on the delimitation of natural landscape types. Ten per cent of the study area shows a high occurrence probability for mill location (>0.9). The spatial distribution of MaxEnt outcomes shows that landscapes prone to mill location mainly concentrate on the edge of morainic plateaus and in the tunnel valleys. The research results allow us to understand the evolution of the cultural landscape in the lowland area, especially the role of mill settlements in colonising of forest areas and river valleys.