We Go to See How a Windmill Works

Tuesday 20 August 2002. We were in Norfolk today and had actually been trying to find a mechanical music museum. Which we did. It was closed on Tuesdays. So then we looked at my Tourist Map of Norfolk and Suffolk and saw that there was a working windmill nearby.

This is Billingford Windmill. It wasn't working that day. But the miller saw us drive into the empty parking spaces and came out to talk to us. As there were no particularly dangerous moving parts actually moving in the mill, he gave us the key and told us to go in and explore but not to fiddle with anything.

A windmill is full of tight-fitting solid iron cogs that would happly reduce an inquisitive finger to a smudge, so this was a bit of instruction we took to heart. We decided that rather than mess about examining each floor then climbing up some fairly steep stairs - let's call them "ladders" as we near the top floor... we would climb all the way up and then do all the puffing and panting before coming down again by easy stages.

Right at the top of a brick tower mill (which is what Billingford was) there is an iron ring on top of the brickwork on which the "cap" of the mill sits. The cap is usually if not always made of wood and resembles an upside down boat. At one end of the boat are the sails that catch the wind and work the mill.

At the other end is a "fantail", a smaller set of sails set at right-angles to the main set and which act in the same way as a weather cock on a church. They turn until the wind is coming directly at them from over the top of the cap. Attached to cogs, they continually turn the main sails directly into the wind. Hence the iron ring around the top of the brickwork and some pretty hefty wheels able to turn the whole weight of the cap.

Unless the sails are facing the wind they won't turn fast enough. Unless the wind comes from the opposite direction in which case they will turn the wrong way and cause a fire - the fate of many mills. That's what the fantail is meant to avoid. Only patented in 1745 (by Edmund Lee in Wigan) the fantail ended the task of having to continually keep watch on the wind direction and then manhandle the cap round via a pulley system or on earlier post-mills (which were totally wooden structures resting on a huge sturdy pole) by having to drag the mill around by man or horse power via a second pole sticking out at the rear.

Once the sails are turning the motion is carried into the mill itself via the axle of the sails. The pointing finger shows the shaft of the axle coming in through the cap to the topmost level of the mill.

Then the (hopefully) gentle turning of the sails is transferred by cog to a vertical shaft and the speed of rotation is stepped up quite a bit. In gales this would quickly generate far too much heat and with it the risk of fire so the sails would have some form of locking mechanism to prevent them them turning.

Still at a high level are the hoppers in which grain would be stored ready to drop down to the grinding stones. The black shaft is the main drive shaft from the cogs seen above.

The grain as seen in the right-hand hopper above. This would be delivered to the mill in sacks, hoisted up to the top levels by a crane and pulley system worked either manually or by hand. In the old days of medieval times mills were operated on behalf of the rich landowners who would charge for each sack of grain they milled. The payment was mostly by a tithe - a percentage of the resulting flour. During times of bad harvest, peasant farmers were lucky to take away enough flour to feed themselves and families.

Once the grain was released down to the mill stones, the flow had to be carefully controlled. The stones would be large flat stones with one rotating over a stationary lower stone. Grooves radiating outwards from the centre of the stone would direct the ground flour and any chunks of unground grain or bits of stone from the grinding wheels that had broken off. Literally: millstone grit.

If the grain was fed too fast between the stones this would result in the flour containing unground grain. If not enough grain was fed in, there was a danger that the stones might touch and strike sparks.

The view from the next-to-top floor level windows. The sails remained still, but when working the view would be obscured every few seconds...

Billingford Mill. It is 36 feet high (10.97 metres) and has five storeys. It dates from 1860 and cost £1,300. It replaced an earlier post mill which blew down in 1859. It can be found on the road from Harleston to Diss.

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index
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Curiosities: Windmills, Wind Pumps, Watermills Index

A series of articles about windmills, watermills, wind-powered drainage pumps and (if I ever get round to them) wind farms.

Each article can be viewed by clicking/tapping the linked photographs below. A link at the end of each article will bring you back to this index.

Rhodes and a Lost Colossus

Ok yes, I know you've been waiting on tenterhooks. We shall see the site of the Colossus of Rhodes in just a minute.

It's the first of October and we are in Rhodes, having walked along the coast road and through the Gate of St Paul in a quest to find the spot where the giant statue, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World stood.

We are walking along the sea wall on the far side of the Mandraki harbour. We pass a short row of windmills, which you can't help but feel were well placed! This wasn't a gorgeously sunny and calm day! We reach a castle on the corner of the sea wall and there we are - at the site of the Colossus.

We return down the sea wall and walk round the inland end of the harbour and along the landward side, passing this large impressive market... What? You want to see the site of the Colossus? Oh...

Well ok, this is it. The photo from this side is much more impressive than the ones I took from the seaward side. Now the Colossus, as with another five of the Ancient Wonders, has totally disappeared. It was ancient as the title suggests. It predates photographs and everything... No one seems to have drawn the thing either, or at least, no contemporary drawings exist. There are lots of speculative drawings. Some say it stood over the harbour entrance with one foot on either side. If so then the two columns, sporting male and female deer, occupy the spots where the feet stood on top of huge base columns.

Others say this would have been beyond the technical capability of the time and the statue would have collapsed. Actually though, it did... Let's give a brief tale. The Rhodians were suffering one of their many sieges and were overjoyed when the cavalry arrived in the form of Ptolemy's naval ships in 304 BC. He expelled the besiegers and Rhodes melted down their abandoned weapons and built the Colossus in the form of their favourite god, Helios. He faced out to sea and held a torch, much akin to the Statue of Liberty. Ships sailed between his legs and those with tall masts made him anxious...

It stood for not much more than half a century and then Rhodes was hit by a massive earthquake in 226 BC. The statue fell (luckily) onto the land so the harbour could still be used. What to do with the remains was a problem. The statue had broken into pieces. They were so large that even broken and on the ground the Colossus drew sightseers. Pliny the Elder said that the thumb was so large most people could not wrap their arms around it.

It lay on the ground for 800 years. One story says that the Arab force which conquered Rhodes in 653 sold the remains to a Jewish trader who broke it up entirely and carried it off on the backs of 900 camels. We are dealing with very ancient history here. Most of the written sources come from a thousand or more years after the statue fell.

Around this spot a chap barged into me and apologised profusely. When I answered and he recognised a fellow Brit, he started talking to us. He had been working as a guide there for 6 months and was from Wythenshaw, Manchester. He warned us about some African women working along the harbour wall. They were offering to tell fortunes. One chap declined and had his hand grabbed and the woman was dragging him back as he tried to walk away. "They are not nice people..." said our new friend.

We entered the old city by the gate near the ruins of a temple to the goddess Aphrodite and walked along the narrow streets, enjoying the atmosphere and the bustle. "Look Fran, that's a mighty fine bustle over there..." [SMACK]

The shops are many and varied. There are a lot of jewellery shops and I spotted the little music shop where I bought some guitar picks on a previous cruise. It was still there with lutes, ukeleles and tambourines hanging outside.

We considered having lunch and exploring further but then my ultra weather-sensitive sensory system (bald head) felt a spot of rain and we made our way back to the harbour and the Thomson Celebration. By the time we reached it, it was going dark with threatening clouds and was spitting as a prelude to heavier rain.

We had some lunch and made our way up to the Horizons bar where I had a high vantage point view over the city. The sketch pad and pencil came out, though I ignored all the modern building and drew in vegetation where they intruded on the impressive presence of the forts and wall of the Knights Hospitallers.

The rain came and did so in such earnest that it was almost as if a mist came down, there was so much water in the air. People were scurrying from building to building along the harbour trying to get back to the ship. We had considered going out again. We changed our minds!

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New Scanner Arrives

Phew! I can now start scanning again as my new scanner has arrived.

I wasn't actually sure that it was the scanner when it arrived - the box was big enough to hold at least half a dozen...

But after digging through all the shredded cardboard packaging inside I only found one box!

It's a Cannon 9000F flatbed and film scanner all in one, so I've been able to replace two separate scanners with just the one. Meant I had to tidy up my desk... duh!

So now I can scan not only my 35mm negatives and slides but the 120 roll film ones as well. And (pauses to let you get a bit excited) Miss Jeannie has given me a box of her father's 120 negatives showing Blackpool properties from the 1960s.

I might work my way slowly through those and take some photos from the same places for comparison with today! But of course I did have to have a go to see if it worked, so to compare yesterday's shots of Marsh Mill, Thornton, with the same place before the craft village was built, here's a shot from 1983/84.

Oh yes! It works!

Breakfast and a Windmill

Yes, you don't often see the two words "breakfast" and "windmill" together, but there you go...!

Saturday started with a celebration.

Miss Franny has finished work in order to be able to look after our granddaughter, Grace, once Gill goes back to work. So the day after the slightly tearful goodbye at Sainsbugs - it was more the rest of the staff than Fran I think - we met up with Eddie and Gill and David and Jeannie for breakfast at Quilligans.

David and Jeannie had phoned to pre-order a bottle of cava and some orange juice and we enjoyed a Bucks Fizz breakfast! Love you guys!

Later in the day we were round at Gill and Eddie's and walked round to the Marsh Mill craft village, where Fran and Gill wanted to buy some things.

I took the camera along to get some shots of the windmill.

And speaking of photography, I'm afraid I bust my film scanner one night this week. So if anyone was wondering why it had gone slightly quiet on my Flickr site (no longer active) then that's why. It's going to have to wait until I find a replacement.

Considering how long I have had it though, I should think I could probably get an upgrade in quality or at least size resolution. And I'm looking for one that can do my 120 roll film negatives and slides too.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index

Meandering in Mykonos

27 May 2012 and the Thomson Celebration came into port at Mykonos town on Mykonos Island in Greece.

First impressions were very favourable - there was a topless girl on the beach not far from where we got off the shuttle bus from the ship... With my usual luck, she was lying face down... "There's a mosquito on your back!" shouted an old chap behind me hopefully. How childish, I thought, as Fran nudged me as a warning not to join in...

I suspect there's a healthy nightlife on the island. At 10:00am of a morning there's hardly anyone about at all apart from a few shop owners setting stalls and display stands out and a few old men sitting on the harbour wall energetically discussing something with much waving of arms. In other words... absolutely perfect!

Some of the streets are narrow to say the least. You'd think that you could walk willy-nilly but you still need to keep an ear cocked for the occasional moped or scooter!

This area with rooms of the buildings at least partially suspended above the sea is known as Little Venice.

Zorbas Bar is perfectly named to draw in the punters! Don't mind if I do, thanks...

The windmills are a major landmark for the town and if you have ever been or seen postcards or photos then this will be a familar sight. The windmills date back as far as the 15th century and the distinctive thatch thus pre-date The Beatles' mop-tops!

We watched with rising concern as an approaching car caused a van to swerve on a collision course with a line of bollards but with a series of soft THWACK! sounds as he hit them, they folded under the van's body and popped up again once he was past. They were made of rubber!

We suddenly came out onto a path on the edge of a low cliff and the scene was just idyllic. Just look at the colours of the sea. Why don't I live there?!?

The 1989 film Shirley Valentine was filmed here. The only thing we were disappointed at was that we didn't see the pelican that everyone had told us we would see. Called Perseus, it has been another staple sight of Mykonos for many years. Perhaps he was on holiday that day...

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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.

Wrea Green Windmill

Oho! The scanning of my old negatives has moved on a pace! We're now into 1982! On the 1st of April that year I was taking photos of various windmills for an article that eventually was published in Lancashire Magazine. We are well blessed with windmills on the Fylde coast. The famous ones are on the Green at Lytham and at Marton where you get off the M55 motorway to head into Blackpool on the old road before the link from the old end of the motorway to the town centre car parks was built. But then there's Marsh Mill at Thornton, there's one at Staining, one at Kirkam and another nearby at Treales, one at Salwick and there are a couple over Wyre at Preesall and Pilling.

This one is Wrea Green mill. Wrea Green, or Ribby with Wrea, is a small village just off the A583 as you head from Blackpool towards Kirkham. It has a small and olde worlde feel to the village centre that gathers around, but allows plenty of space for, the large village green complete with duck pond.

In April 1982 the windmill at Wrea Green was little more than a ruin. The tower of the mill was there and the single storey building next to it, but the inside of the tower was empty and uncapped, showing signs of that all too common a fate for windmills - fire. The miller's skill was in regulating the flow of grain to the stones. Too fast and the grain wasn't ground properly so your flour would have hard lumps in it. Too slow and the stones would touch and spark and so you had a fire. Flour is combustible - and rather good at it! In this case however, the cause of the fire was an exploding steam engine!

Windmills make a bit of noise when working as you might imagine. Apart from the sails creaking round there are all those big wooden cog wheels clacking about inside and the stones spinning round and the sound of grain falling from hoppers... A neighbour was incensed when the mill was built. He planted a row of trees to block the wind. You can imagine how this may have led to a certain tense relationship between the miller and his neighbour... With the mill unable to use wind power, the miller turned to a recent invention: the steam engine. Now, what a noise that must have made! But alas for the miller and the bread lovers of Wrea Green - the engine blew apart and started a fire that gutted the mill.

Shortly after I took these photos the mill was converted into a home and now has a new lease of life.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index

Thornton Windmill As It Was

This is Thornton Windmill taken in 1984 before the craft village and Tavern At The Mill pub restaurant were built. Thornton is reached by heading inland from Cleveleys, near Blackpool. The area around the mill at that time was just scrubland and a high concrete fence surrounded the back of the mill. The photo was taken on a 2¼" square colour transparency or colour slide, on a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera. I've currently no way of scanning such large transparencies so this was scanned from the 1985 Blackpool Gazette calendar in which it appeared.⁽¹⁾ This was my first calendar publication. The following year I had not only the front cover of the calendar but another two or three shots inside also. The front cover was shown on a previous posting.

The windmill is the tallest one in the Fylde (the larger area including Lytham, St Annes, Blackpool, Cleveleys, Poulton and Singleton). There are around half a dozen windmills still standing in the Fylde with another two "over Wyre". At one time though the sails of around 40 mills could be seen from the top of Blackpool Tower. Built in 1794, by the 1920s the first two floors of Thornton Mill had been converted into tea rooms, run by the Misses Barter and Baldwin who advertised:

The Ideal Place for Motorists
DAINTY TEAS, LIGHT LUNCHEONS
Rooms let for picnic, Wedding and
other parties. Parking Ground.

(1) Having subsequently bought a scanner capable of scanning large transparencies, the photographs here have been re-scanned and updated as part of a project begun in 2019 to bring all of my Blackpool entries up to my current standard.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index

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