Wrea Green and Warton Curiosities

Once again going back to 1983 and a couple of curiosities from the Fylde countryside.

This is the old village pump at Wrea Green. Hard to imagine in England in the present day having to go outside with a bucket or other container to fetch your water from a communal source. At least water from a pump like this had a chance of being clean and pure in a small village. Pure even so is probably a relative term... From open wells, the chances of polluted water were much higher and in hot weather you had to fish out the tadpoles, frogs and newts and algae!

As far as I can tell, all traces of this have disappeared now apart from the name of the road. Mill Lane in Warton, near the gates of British Aerospace, gives a clue to what this is. There are three types of windmill. There are lots of examples of brick tower mills left in England and the Fylde and Wyre countryside manages to get into double figures. Then there are the wooden smock mills, seen mainly in the south of England. The earliest form was the post mill. A wooden building sat on a central post such as this one - for that is what it is. The post acted as a pivot in the days before they worked out how to sit a windmill's cap on a circle of cogs to rotate to keep the sails into the wind. Around this central post the entire building was rotated by means of a post sticking out of the back of the mill attached to either a horse or the miller's wife...

The mill in question had originally been built at Tarleton between Preston and Liverpool, but was then moved painstakingly to Warton where it eventually rotted away. Developments since 1983 have led to the post's removal.

A Taste for Windmills

After scanning the photos of windmills in Norfolk yesterday, I thought we'd have a bit of a windmill tour today.

In the photograph is one of the Fylde's most famous windmills, Lytham's mill next to the old lifeboat house on the fabulous green sward that so characterises Lytham's coastline.

It was a clear day too, Lytham is at the mouth of the River Ribble which has its source in the Yorkshire Dales, passing Selside and Settle before crossing the border into Lancashire. It then passes through the witchlands of Pendle and past the castle at Clitheroe. It remembers the Roman bath house and cavalry fort at Ribchester and maybe knows the true story of the Grey Lady of Salmesbury Hall, before remembering great docks at Preston.

I stood for a while admiring the large rusting anchor in front of the lifeboat house with the rooftops of Southport clearly visible on the far side of the river. Back in the car, we motored through Warton. Now more known for its British Aerospace test flights, it had at one time an early windmill. It was a post mill - a structure built purely of wood, a design in use long before the brick-built tower mills that still exist in the Fylde. This mill had been brought over the Ribble as it used to stand at Tarleton.

When I visited the site in the early 1980s all that remained was the central post and a couple of mill stones to tell what it was. Now there has been some more development and the spot where it stood has been tarmacked over to form a car park. The only clue to the one-time existence of the windmill is the name of the road - Mill Lane.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index