East Sussex : the Chailey windmill

You can tell that a friend knows you well when they collect you from the station at the start of your visit and, as a lovely surprise, take you to visit a new-to-you windmill on the way to their home. My friend Jill knows me very well indeed!

Our surprise visit was to the Heritage Mill at Chailey in East Sussex, and what a charming windmill it is. Though in need of a good wash down to clean off its winter accumulation of green mould and lichen, it’s easy, I think, to see why this is labelled a ‘smock’ mill – its grubby white, weather-boarded, slightly A-line body shape bears a very strong resemblance to the blousey type of shirt worn by male farming workers in years gone by and that is exactly how this design of windmill acquired its name.

Windmills came in three types, the post mill, the smock mill and the tower mill. The diagram below, which was actually photographed at another windmill (more on that one in my next blog post), gives a brief explanation of the differences in design but, basically, in a smock mill it’s the top part only, the cap, that rotates -- with the aid of its fantail (the attachment at the top) so that its sails face into the wind -- rather than the entire body of the mill rotating around a central post (that would be a post mill).

Occasionally, luckily only very occasionally, a freakishly strong wind gust can catch that fantail and spin the top section around against the wind – in windmill-speak, the mill gets tailwinded – and that's exactly what happened to this mill, not once but twice in its working life.

In fact, this windmill has had a particularly interesting history: it was originally constructed in 1830 at Highbrook, near West Hoathly, then was dismantled and moved, in 1844, to serve as a navigation marker on the south coast at Newhaven, before being moved again, by bullock cart, to its final resting site in 1864.

Once re-erected at Chailey, the windmill operated as a flour mill for the local community, though the windmill's life was still not without incident. The first of the tailwindings I mentioned above, which resulted in the top cap and sails being completely blown off the mill, happened during a violent storm on 5 January 1928, and in 1935 another violent weather event caused the second tailwinding, effectively bringing the mill's working life to an end when the sails blew away and the windshaft snapped. The mill machinery was dismantled, its interior gutted, and the building served a variety of purposes, from tuck shop to emergency accommodation for World War II nurses, until being taken under the wing of the Friends of Chailey Windmill in 1986.

Though the building was not open when we visited, it now houses a Rural Life Museum, containing photographs and displays about past times in the Chailey area. You can find out more about the museum and its opening times on their website.