Mill Green Windmill

Mill Green Windmill

A post mill of 1759, rebuilt in 1959, designed by Robert Barker for Lord Petre. The mill stands on an earlier base and roundhouse on a mound now located in the back garden of a private house called Millhurst.

The roundhouse is a circular structure of one storey built in red brick laid in Flemish bond externally and English bond internally, mostly painted. The brickwork is 0.33 metres thick with four projecting piers that house the ends of the trestle. It has two boarded doors and a conical roof covered with copper. The body of the mill is timber-framed and wholly weatherboarded, with a slightly pointed breast, and rises three storeys high. In the lower storey are two fixed multi-pane windows and a boarded door with a window; the middle storey has two fixed windows and two hinged hatches; the top storey contains one fixed window and a removable hatch. The roof is gabled with curved sides. The mill originally had two single-shuttered sails, though two are broken and the shutters and striking gear are missing. A ladder provides access to the body and a long tailpole extends from it.

Interior: Within the roundhouse, the main post is chamfered with large scroll stops and is inscribed 'E.D. 1759' in paint. The struts of the trestle are chamfered with lamb's tongue stops. Both horizontal members are reduced with quarter-round mouldings and are scarfed, splayed and tabled with under-squinted butts and folding edge-wedges, strapped and bolted with iron. The lower storey of the body contains two sets of wooden tentering gear and two governors, alongside meal bins and spouts. The post is punched with 'E.D. T.D. 1759' (the millers from 1753 to 1852 were called Dearman). The middle storey houses two sets of millstones in head-and-tail layout with tuns, horses, hoppers and shoes. An iron windshaft carries a clasp-arm wooden brakewheel and tailwheel, each fitted with wooden stone nuts and quants. The brakewheel disintegrated in a gale in 1976 and was reconstructed by the time of inspection in May 1989. Additional equipment includes a machine drive shaft, pulleys, chain drive to sack hoist, striking gear, wooden brake lever and chutes. The top storey contains corn bins, sack hoist and pulleys, and the upper half of the brakewheel.

The mill appears on Chapman and André's map of 1777. Records of expenditure on repairs and equipment are held in the Petre archives from 1802 to 1903 in the Essex Record Office. The structure was rebuilt in 1959 for the then owner R.F. Collinson; the machinery was carefully preserved and is mostly original. The site has always been in the historical parish of Ingatestone and is documented in the Petre archives relating to that parish. This is the most complete example of a post mill with head-and-tail layout in Essex.