A visit to Beautiful Cromer Windmill

We took a trip to Cromer Windmill, which is at a small village just outside Stevenage, but found that it is in the middle of having the boarding replaced and so is draped with scaffolding which made my efforts to take photographs of this beautiful windmill a bit meaningless.

Cromer Windmill

The mill is a post mill, which means it is constructed with a vast timber post which runs to the second floor of the mill. The mill was initially turned to face the wind by hand but later had a fantail fitted to automatically turn it.

The thing which struck me as we were shown around by Simon the miller, was the number of mechanical systems used which automate the various things the miller had to do. We think of feedback systems as modern, computer age systems, but people were devising systems to assist them, based on a feedback loop 300 years ago and constructing them from the mechanical tools at their disposal.

I would recommend anyone who is passing when the mill is open to stop and have a look. It’s very cheap and a very informative and interesting hour or so.

The photo below shows Cromer Windmill with the scaffolding. It, and the rest of the photos I took that day can be seen in the Flickr set I created. For those interested in the camera I used it was a Pentax K200D, along with the standard kit lens.