In the middle centuries several corn mills were built. Locally for instance, there was Kittoch Mill which was worked until about 1908, the present-day house partly reconstructed during the 1950s from the mill, cottage and barn. The ruins of Philipshill Mill stand further up the same Water, and there was Cathkin Mill near Fernhill. Arthur More’s meal mill on the White Cart Water at Busby was where the print-works for the Cotton Mills later stood, and at Waterfoot on the Eaglesham road, the Mill of Dripps only ceased operating in the 1970s although a small business is still run selling meal and some animal feed.
The diet of meal, dairy produce, roots, berries and herbs, trapped birds and occasional meat, was made tastier with the addition of salt or sweeter with honey. In some of the early cottages in Carmunnock, there is a hollow area or small recess in the thickness of the wall close to the heat of the kitchen fire. This stone cavity may have been used as an oven, heated first with hot ashes for rising the dough of next day’s bread; but more usually it was where, if the householder could afford to buy it, a lump of salt was kept dry.
Many cottagers kept bees and in Carmunnock we are lucky to have an interesting 18th century row of stone bee boles that housed five bee skeps in shelter from harsh weather. These bee boles are made up of stone blocks about 1½ ft. square by less than a foot, set on end at equal distance from one another on which rest arches of stone spanning from one block to the next. This row, standing on slabs of stone with another line of thinner slabs along the top to secure it, was built against a sheltering wall, and at first the five arched spaces about 1½ ft. in depth would be lined every year with fresh straw wrapped round wooden trays like a primitive hive. As time went on, they made straw skeps to set in each in which the bees could nest, breed and make their honey.
It is interesting to note that in early times, rents or tithes were sometimes paid in honey or by donating candles made from beeswax to the churches.
Till 1977, Carmunnock’s bee boles of the 1760s, a listed item belonging to Bankhead Farm on Busby Road, stood in front of the farmhouse. But since a change in ownership the bee boles, although still in the village, have been carefully moved to a private site. There is also an interesting bee house in Kittochside village.