Drinkstone Smock Mill (including attached engine shed and oil engine)

Drinkstone Smock Mill

A former smock windmill with attached outbuildings, believed to date to the late 18th century. The mill was constructed on the site of an earlier horse mill and underwent alteration and extension in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By this time the sails, fantail and original wind-driven machinery had been removed, and the mill was subsequently powered by a Ruston and Hornby oil engine installed in 1932.

The mill is timber-framed with a weather-boarded exterior to its smock tower and a cap covered in metal sheeting. The tower stands upon a sixteen-sided timber-framed and brick base, believed to have formed part of the earlier horse mill. Much of the upper part of the tower is currently covered in black plastic sheeting secured by vertical battens.

The mill tower is octagonal in plan and tapered in profile above the sixteen-sided ground-floor stage with vertical walls. This lower stage features exposed horizontal weatherboarding and incorporates a doorway with a three-pane overlight on its central southern segment. The tower rises to support a domed pepperpot cap covered in aluminium sheeting. Projecting through the cap in a south-easterly direction are stubs of sheer extensions that once supported a dormer housing the hand winding gear, now removed.

Attached to the tower to the north and north-west is a range of single-storey outbuildings. The vertically-boarded building to the north is an engine shed with a pair of external water tanks carried on projecting brick piers beyond its north wall. A covering structure extends from the engine house to the mill tower, enclosing the drive belts and pulleys that drove the mill. Attached to the south end of the engine house is a horizontally-boarded building, formerly a granary, formed from a re-used First World War billet hut. This has a doorway and two six-pane windows on the south side wall, a doorway in the west gable end, and a short boarded link extending to the mill tower from the south side wall.

The interior of the mill tower comprises four floors. The ground floor has a void below the suspended floor boarding, thought to have formed part of the circa 1700 horse mill that preceded the smock mill. Above are two further full floors and a floor extending into and incorporating the interior of the mill cap. The tower walls are formed of panels of diagonally-braced studs set between sloping cant posts which delineate the tower facets, with horizontal sill and head timbers. At each floor level, bridging beams support the floor joists and floor boarding, the joists being nail-fixed into the head beams of the wall panels. At ground-floor level, the stubs of a pair of knee-braced beams are visible at a lower level than the three later beams and are thought to represent an original lower floor associated with the wind-driven stage of operation. The bridging beams to the first and third-level floors are set at right angles to those at ground and second-floor level. The wall panels to the cap floor are shorter than those below and support the curved timber curb ring of the original mill cap, which in turn supports the cap frame and renewed curved cap rafters. The original base framework for the cap also survives. Access to each level is by steep flights of timber ladder steps.

The surviving fixtures and fittings relate principally to the final phase of operation when the mill was powered by the oil engine installed in 1932. The Ruston and Hornby oil engine remains in the attached engine house, together with the belt drives, pulleys and line shafting connecting it to the pairs of millstones now located on the ground floor of the tower. The stones are carried on a hurst frame and are under-driven. Associated with the millstones are other early 20th-century milling and mixing machines on the ground and first floors, together with short sections of line shafting driving them, a worm-driven elevator and chutes from the first floor. Surviving grain bins remain on the upper floors. Most surviving evidence of the wind-driven phase of operation has been removed, apart from a cast-iron gear ring fitted above the curb ring in the late 19th century when the fan tail was installed, together with the iron track and truck wheels which formed part of the mill cap mechanism.