A brick works was located alongside the canal between the Nottingham and Kinoulton Roads and many of the houses in West Bridgford are built of Cropwell Bishop bricks, carried there by barges on the canal. An earlier brickworks was located behind Rose Villa on Cropwell Butler Road. Mill Lane received its name from the steam mill that once stood there and was used to grind corn. Photographs still exist of the mill that came to a sudden end in 1910 when the steam engine blew up. Previously, corn had been ground in a windmill situated at the top of Fern Hill on the south side. It is first mentioned in 1686. It blew down in a gale in 1849 but was back at work by 1851. Nothing now remains of the building. The oldest of the public houses in the village is The Wheatsheaf, the building dating from the 1600’s. The two other pubs, The Chequers and The Lime Kiln, still exist, but The Canal Inn and The Plough and Harrow, have long gone. The latter, known as The Plough, was situated on Stockwell Lane and is now the house with the flat roof, the original roof having been destroyed in a fire. This pub used to function as a beer and wine retailer as well as a pub. The quarrying of gypsum played an important part in the life of Cropwell Bishop in the first half of the 20th century. There were two main firms mining gypsum, the Gotham Company and Messrs Heaselden. They employed many men and there were a number of fatalities, unsurprising considering the conditions that men were allowed to work in then. The gypsum was of a very high quality and was used in the manufacture of medicines. Just beyond the roving bridge site stands an old warehouse, believed to be contemporary with the canal. This was originally used to process gypsum and there is a distinct widening where the wharves would have been situated. In this warehouse the rock was crushed to powder and put into sacks before being loaded onto waiting barges. The local gypsum was of a high quality (i.e. very white) and was used for medicinal pills, brewing and plaster of Paris. From 1951 the British Gypsum Company began quarrying for the rock and the underground mines ceased to operate. The three main areas where this quarrying took place are shown on OS maps alongside the canal between Fosse Bridge and Cropwell as ‘Disused Workings’. With only a short break in the 1980s, quarrying continued until 1994. The three lakes at Kilvington were formed as a result of open-cast gypsum extraction. Gypsum is a heavy whitish crystalline rock which occurs in beds typically 25 feet or so beneath the surface. Its chemical substance is hydrated calcium sulphate, and its main uses are for making plaster and plaster-board for building, plaster-of-paris for setting broken bones, and a host of minor uses including as a carrier for medical pills, and a whitener for bread.