It's easy to become over-familiar with your town centre, so you hardly notice its striking historical or quirky features. One thing Dawlish has that ticks both of those boxes is the slowly revolving water mill wheel just off Brunswick Place – an extremely rare sight in the centre of any town, and – at 10 metres in diameter – also one of the largest in the country.

The wheel of the Strand Mill towers over the courtyard of The Old Mill Tea Room, popular for its home-made cakes and scones – and once that mill would have produced the flour used for making these items, which were baked in ovens at the back of the building. Jan and Geoff Whittaker, who have run the cafe for the last six years, have produced an information sheet on the building's history, and it tells an interesting story.

Mill was surrounded by meadows, with grazing animals

The original mill was built in 1717, and old pictures show it was the only building in that area. Animals used to graze around the building, with its cob walls and thatched roof, in what was then meadowland with a stream flowing through it.

After a serious fire in the early 1800s the mill was slowly rebuilt, with the work finally finishing in 1825. It remained primarily a flour mill, but also produced animal feed. The building that now houses the Tea Room had a potato store added to the front.

When the mill was working, it was not unknown for up to 80 tons of wheat to be delivered by horse and cart in a single day. These would have been in sacks of up to two and a half hundredweight (280 pounds, or 127.25 kilogrammes), and were unloaded by hand to be hauled up to a store at the top of the building.

All the power for transporting these heavy sacks up to the store came from the water wheel, using a drive belt from the wheel shaft, and a series of other belts. If one of these belts broke or came off, the whole building would shake. The sacks were unloaded and the contents emptied into hoppers in the store, sending up great clouds of dust as the wheat poured out.

How the wheel was powered

The water mill had a pitchback wheel, meaning the water pours into the buckets from behind the top of the wheel, and it turns anti-clockwise. The millpond was located behind the houses in Plantation Terrace and the water was carried to the wheel by a 'launder' or trough. There is a herringbone power exchange gearing wheel inside the building, which is quite a rare feature in wheel construction.

In 1920 the mill was taken over by Torbay Mill Company Ltd, which continued using it until 1959 when the water to power it was turned off.

[H4]The restoration project[.H4]

Nearly four decades later, in 1997, a project to restore the Strand Mill was started by a small group of local people who had been raising funds for the purpose. Teignbridge District Council helped greatly with a donation of £10,000 in January 2003, and the Dawlish Conservation Trust also played a key role.

The project received an Awards for All lottery grant, and work began in November 2003, with much of it carried out by volunteers. A new water supply had to be found as the launder no longer existed and the leat had been diverted; the solution was to fill the sump of the wheel pit with water and pump it upwards to feed the wheel.

The wheel was restarted on May 5 2004, and the wheel pumps were turned on by Mr Bill Strickland – the same man who had turned the mill off 45 years ago. Today, the wheel turns regularly for short periods throughout the day during the café's opening hours, and nearly all of the internal machinery and millstones can be seen inside the ground floor seating area. Other parts, on higher floors of the building, can be viewed by appointment.

Dawlish residents say the town is known to outsiders for just two things – its black swans, and the dramatic damage to its railway in the 2014 storms. But perhaps it should also be known for the Strand Mill, a stunning and rare town centre feature, and a part of Dawlish's history.