The water-mill with the horizontal wheel remains a characteristic feature of peasant Tc ulture in several Faeroe settlements, but its remaining days of usefulness among the islands are doubtless numbered. Formerly, nearly all the villages appear to have maintained one or more such mills for the production of rugmjJ, the coarse brown flour made from the six-rowed barley (Hordeurn vulgare Linn.), but in the majority of places these interesting structures have fallen into desuetude, or have vanished completely, within the last thirty or forty years.