It’s National Mills Weekend!

This coming weekend, 11 and 12 May, is National Mills Weekend, an annual event organised by SPAB, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, to celebrate Britain’s wind- and water-milling heritage.

Hog Hill windmill in East Sussex - on the list for closer investigation

Wind and water mills, some not usually open to the public, creak open their doors and welcome visitors who want to explore their fascinating innards. This year the focus is ‘A nationwide celebration of Britain’s mills in pictorial form’. As the SPAB press release explains:   

With their quirky shape, elegant sails or distinctive waterwheels, it’s not surprising that windmills and watermills appear so frequently in paintings and photographs, posters and postcards. These instantly recognisable buildings feature in some of Britain’s favourite works of art too: in a recent poll, John Constable’s The Hay Wain, featuring Flatford Mill in Suffolk, was voted the nation’s second best-loved painting.

Why not go and visit a mill near you this weekend? The SPAB website provides links to events up and down the country. 

Not being particularly handy with a pencil or paintbrush, my salute to Britain’s mills is in the form of photographs. I’ve blogged about those I’ve seen in Cheshire (watermills) and Sussex (windmills) and here in Glamorgan (one very much neglected windmill ruin). Here’s the list so far (I already have plans to visit several more), with links to the individual blog posts - just click on the mill's name if you want to read or see more.

In Sussex, the Argos Hill windmill

Chailey windmill

Halnaker windmill

Stone Cross (left) and Windmill Hill (right) windmills

In Cheshire, two watermills: a mention and photos of Nether Alderley mill

and a brief mention and a couple of photos of the watermill on the Dunham Massey Estate

In Wales, the ruined and neglected and overgrown Hayes Farm windmill.

A tale of two East Sussex windmills

It didn’t take long for my friend Jill’s fascination with windmills to infect me, and these photogenic structures now captivate me with their intriguing stories and enchanting architecture. Here are two from my recent visit to East Sussex.

Stone Cross windmill

Built around 1875 and restored to full working order between 1995 and 2000, the Stone Cross windmill is, their signboard claims, ‘one of the finest tower mills ever built in England’. Its statistics are certainly impressive: a 38-foot-high (11.58 metre) five-level brick tower, which is 16 feet 6 inches (5.03 metres) in diameter at its base and 11 feet (3.35 metres) at the curb; and sweeps (the name for the mill’s revolving sails) spanning 64 feet (19.5 metres) and holding 174 shutters (the angles of which control the speed of the sweeps).

The mill still produces flour stone-ground in the traditional way, which sounds delightful and I’m sure would taste delicious but do remember that stone-ground means the flour may well contain tiny pieces of stone, which is one of the reasons why the teeth of people in the past got rapidly ground down. According to the windmill’s somewhat incomplete website, the building also contains a small museum and a cafe, though there are no details given of its opening times.

Windmill Hill windmill

We had driven past this windmill so many times on our way to places elsewhere but, as there are not a lot of spots to park, we’d never stopped ... until, one day in mid February, on the way back from Rye Harbour, Jill managed to squeeze us in to the back end of a bus stop for a few minutes. Unfortunately, the view from the roadside is marred by the power lines but we did sneak up a driveway for a slightly better view of the side of this mill.

There had been a previous windmill on this site – proving just how well this high point catches the breezes – but it was demolished prior to the construction, in around 1814, of the mill we see today. This is a post mill, one of the earliest types of windmill, which I now know means ‘the whole body of the mill that houses the machinery is mounted on a single vertical post, around which it can be turned to bring the sails into the wind’ (as opposed to the Stone Cross tower mill, where only the cap, not the whole body of the mill, is rotated).

Using one pair of French Burr stones and another of Derbyshire Peak stones, this mill also processed corn in to flour. Like the Stone Cross building, the Windmill Hill mill has undergone extensive restoration in recent years, through the work of a charitable trust and the tireless efforts of a multitude of volunteers. (You can read more on their website here.) I love that so many people are so passionate about preserving these remnants of Britain’s industrial and cultural heritage so that both the present and future generations can admire and enjoy them.