EVERYTHING from a tandem to tractors will go under the hammer at a dispersal sale with a difference this Saturday.

A remarkable collection of tractors, other agricultural machinery and domestic items accumulated over 40 years is being broken up as the owners of Crakehall watermill prepare to sell the property.

Many of the pieces have been stored by Malcolm Gill in a small museum in an outbuilding at the mill where he and his wife, Ros, arrived in late 1998 after they bought it from the late Peter Townsend.

Mr Gill has collected many items made by the Leeming Bar foundry of F Mattison and Co and by his family firm of John H Gill and Sons, which took over Mattison's in 1937.

On Saturday at the mill, auctioneer Robin Jessop will sell 100 lots which include four tractors, a roller, a feed cake crusher, a turnip cutter, a plough and a trough as well as domestic equipment such as a stone water bottle and a small butter churn. Tools used by joiners and blacksmiths will also go under the hammer.

Mr and Mrs Gill ran a caravan park near Thirsk for seven years after he left John H Gill and Sons, where he was sales director, in 1991.

When he arrived at Crakehall he found that the iron frame for the mill waterwheel had been made at Leeming Bar by Mattison's. The firm was taken over 65 years ago by his grandfather, John Henry Gill, an agricultural engineer from Danby.

Mr Gill hopes the sale of the watermill will be concluded by next month. It will continue as a working tourist attraction. He said: "I feel I have done what I can with it.

"I have worked solidly for 40 years and I am now 56. I want to take the gap year which I missed out on when I was at college and then take stock."

The dispersal sale will include a 1945 Standard Fordson tractor, a 1948 International Model H, a 1960 Massey Ferguson 35 and a 1979 Massey Ferguson 135.

But Mr Gill intends to keep two other tractors as well as some other items which have been donated or which have sentimental value because of their connections with Mattison's and his own firm.

He said: "It will be sad in one respect to see this auction because I have collected all this stuff over 40 years.

"Rather than put it all into store when we leave, I would like other people to have the opportunity to enjoy it."

The mill, a listed building, was saved from dereliction in the Seventies by the late Col Whittaker Holmes, but it was Mr Townsend who put it on the map as a tourist attraction.