East Sussex : Rye windmill

I realised when compiling my previous blog, in celebration of National Mills Weekend, that I had never written about one of the windmills I’ve visited in East Sussex, the one located in the historic old town of Rye.

This grade-II-listed building is a reconstructed smock mill and it sits alongside the river Tillingham, a very short walk from the centre of Rye, but this is not the first mill to have been built on this site. According to the windmill owner’s website, which references the 1594 Symondons map of Rye, there has been a mill here since at least the sixteenth century. It goes on:

The first recorded owner of a Rye Mill was Thomas Chatterton who built a 'post mill' in 1758. After his death his widow, Mary, passed it on to a Frederick Barry who demolished the 'post mill' in 1820 to erect a 'Smock Mill', similar to the one we see today. Milling continued until 1912 when the premises became a bakery. Eventually to be owned by the Webbs, a well regarded family of Rye bakers who were to become custodians of the Windmill for over 60 years.

Unfortunately, on a Friday 13th in 1930, the ovens of the bakery overheated and destroyed the wooden structure on the mill, leaving just the two story brick base. The mill was reconstructed in 1932 and it continued as a bakery until 1976. The ovens were put to good use when the mill became a pottery. The original oven doors can be seen in the base of the Windmill.

Since 1984, the mill has operated as bed and breakfast accommodation – now wouldn’t that be a special place for a weekend away? (No, I’m not on commission and I haven’t stayed there ... yet.) You can find out more about the mill and see some wonderful old images, both photographs and paintings, on its website.

East Sussex : the Argos Hill windmill

I visited the Argos Hill windmill, near Mayfield in northern East Sussex, on Sunday 12 March, its first open day of 2019, when staying with my friend Jill, who's another windmill fan. This was the first windmill open day I'd been too and, though this particular mill no longer functions, it has been much restored so we were able to take a good look at its inner workings on three separate levels.

The Argos Hill windmill, one of only 50 post mills still extant in England, began its working life around 1835, with its two pairs of milestones being used to produce both fine flour for human consumption and a course meal for animal feed. A post mill, for those who are not familiar with windmill terminology, is one where the entire body of the mill rotates on its immensely strong central post to face into the prevailing wind.

During its working life, the Argos Hill windmill passed through the hands of three separate milling families – the Westons, Mr G. Wickens, and Mr Richardson of the Neve family – and continued production right through until 1927, when all work ceased. The fantail blew off in a gale in 1928, and the shutters were removed from the sails in 1932, after which the mill sat abandoned until its first restoration began in 1955. Since then, the mill has suffered damage by lightning and gales and the 1987 hurricane but, since the Friends of Argos Hill was set up in 1999, it has been extensively conserved, preserved and maintained.

For the open day, much of the ground-level space inside the mill building had been cleared to allow for a milling demonstration using small quern stones and the energy of eager youngsters wanting to show off their upper body strength. Wheat was poured into the top hole, the stone was rotated (which obviously took some effort) and the crushed wheat spilled out from the gap between the stones. For a finer result, the mixture was swept up with a paintbrush, poured back in the top and the process repeated. I still wouldn't have wanted to let the flour anywhere near my teeth though.

The ground level also had a few interesting historical images and instructive signboards on display, and tea, coffee and cake were being sold as a way to raise money for the ongoing restoration work. Amazingly we didn't indulge!

Behind the mill structure was an intriguing device that I had never seen at a windmill before – the fantail. The Friends of Argos Hill Mill's website explains   

The fantail assembly is of traditional Sussex design. The fantail is fastened to the tailpole, which is independent of the steps. The fantail drives the two wooden cart wheels on the track around the mill, to keep the sails facing into the wind.

Even if it had already been fully restored, the fantail could not function as it used to as there is no longer sufficient space around the building. How amazing it must once have been though.

Clambering up the steps by the fantail we reached the spout floor and I was immediately struck by the intricacy and ingenuity of the engineering, as well as the impressive craftsmanship that had obviously gone into making and restoring everything. The spout floor, as you might have guessed, houses the spouts down which the milled flour pours into bins for bagging.

The next floor up, reached by a near vertical ladder, was the stone floor where the grinding actually took place. I can scarcely imagine the noise that must have made many a mill worker deaf when the mill was in full swing. We didn't venture up to the very top level, the bin floor, on to which the sacks of wheat were hoisted and emptied to begin the milling process.

Keen volunteers were on hand at each level to explain the mechanics of the windmill with true enthusiasm, and the windmill – and their well-run open day – were a wonderful testament to their backbreaking conservation efforts and their commitment to preserving such important parts of England's early industrial heritage. The Friends run a series of open days each year – see here for the dates – and I’d highly recommend a visit if you’re in the area. 

Halnaker Windmill

From Boxgrove Priory (see previous post), Jill and I headed north to find the building we’d really travelled across the county to see that day, Halnaker Windmill – we have a bit of a thing about windmills and this was one we’d been planning to visit for perhaps a year!

This was a Saturday so the roads were busy, in part due to a local event called ‘The Festival of Speed’ – not something we knew anything about, but we assumed that was why the first lay-by where we were hoping to park was full and so we carried on to the second. From there, we followed a public footpath alongside fields tall with golden cereal crops and, somewhat surprisingly, the symmetrical rows of grapevines. The footpath was ancient, part of the old Roman Road of Stane Street, which once carried legions, traders and assorted travellers from London to Chichester, just a few miles further south. Truth be known, this was probably an even more ancient path as many Roman Roads follow much older trackways where people have walked for thousands of years.

We could tell no Romans had walked this way for a while as the path was quite overgrown with brambles and bracken in parts, and we emerged at the other end with a few scratches for our trouble, but it was worth it. We had already gained some height in the landscape, and the views continued to improve as we pressed on up the wider, more well defined roadway to the windmill. (Something quite momentous and thrilling happened around this point but I’ll explain more in my next blog post.)

The top of Halnaker (pronounced Hanaker – the L is silent) Hill is a scheduled ancient monument as Neolthic people once constructed a causewayed enclosure here and, in more recent times, a World War Two observation post (for radio direction-finding) was also built here. But it was the windmill we wanted to see.

The first recorded windmill on this site was built in the 16th century, for the use of the Duke of Richmond’s local Goodwood Estate, though the present structure is not that old – it dates from the mid 1700s and continued to function until 1905, when it was struck by lightning.

The entry for the mill on the Historic England website explains its structure:

Red brick, covered with a thin coating of burnt Sussex tiles. Octagonal cap of beehive shape, made of sheets of metal, with finial. Sweeps intact. Fantail missing. The mill is only a shell with no internal floors or machinery.

The windmill was in a ruinous state when it was first restored in 1934, then needed restoration again in 1954 and once more in 2004. And it’s still being restored. An article in the Chichester Observer of 28 June 2018 notes that its tiles were replaced in October 2017, its white cap and balcony have just been repaired and repainted, and there is a photograph showing the recent refitting of the sails – so we were lucky to see it in such fine condition, though the building was still fenced off and lacked a proper door.

It’s wonderful to see this historic structure being so well cared for and conserved. Not only do visitors get a close-up look at this wonderful old building but, from its site so high on the South Downs, the panoramic views of the surrounding countryside are amazing. Both the windmill and those panoramas are well worth the climb up the hill to see.