Yorkshire windmills through time (From York Press)

Yorkshire windmills through time

10:57am Monday 14th November 2011 in History articles By Stephen Lewis

FEW buildings stir the blood in quite the way a good old-fashioned windmill does.

Sadly, there aren’t that many left now: and those there are tend to be mere stumps, shorn of their sails and turned into quirky houses or boutique hotels, or else forgotten altogether.

If you know where to look, however, there are more of these wonderful old buildings about than you’d suppose. York has its Holgate Windmill, of course, in the process of being lovingly restored. And, scattered across Yorkshire’s broad acres, there are many more, in varied states of repair or disrepair.

In his new book Yorkshire Windmills Through Time, Whitby local historian Alan Whitworth has done a splendid job of tracing, through the use of photographs both old and new, the history of many of the county’s finest.

Some of the windmills pictured in Alan’s book – such as the beautiful post mill at Hemingbrough, near Selby – are long gone now. The Hemingbrough mill, with its distinctive wooden construction, was demolished in 1929. Another windmill to have vanished is the one at Tollerton, also pictured in Alan’s book.

A stone mill, thought to have been built some time after 1772, it went out of use before the Second World War. “It is said that while it stood empty, a sail blew off in a gale,” Alan writes.

If that happened, it must have been repaired. The photo in Alan’s book shows the mill while it was actually in the process of being dismantled, in August 1942. It only has three sails: but a fourth lies on its side, propped against the base of the windmill, presumably having only just been taken down.

Other mills in Alan’s book, such as the one up Mill Street, just off Victoria Road in Scarborough, have been lovingly restored, in this case as part of a hotel. Alan has photos of it both in its heyday as a mill, and in its new incarnation today.

Photographs of scores of mills feature in this 96-page book. Often, as in the case of the Scarborough mill on Mill Street, Alan has juxtaposed photos of the mills in their prime with the way they look today.

In other cases, where the mills have vanished completely, the book acts as a loving tribute to a type of building which once adorned the English landscape, but which has now largely disappeared.

• Yorkshire Windmills Through Time, by Alan Whitworth, is published by Amberley, priced £14.99

NOTE: In this piece we suggested that the windmill at Tollerton had been demolished. A number of readers have written in to correct this. It was damaged in a storm during the war, but was converted into a home in 1969 and, following another recent renovation, is still very much standing.