Types of windmill

There are three main types of windmill:

• Post mills: one of the earliest types of mill with the main body mounted on an upright post allowing the mill to rotate and face the wind.

• Smock mills: consists of a sloping tower usually with six or eight sides clad in weatherboard, on a brick base and topped with a roof or cap that rotates to bring the sails into the wind.

• Tower mills: these mills are fixed so that it is the wooden cap (or top) of the mill that rotates to face the wind, rather than the body of the mill. The towers are cylindrical and built of either brick or stone.

The original mill in 1604 was most likely not a tower mill, but a post mill, as these were the earlier designs common at that time. The 1822 reconstruction of Orwell mill is most definitely a tower mill. It was constructed of clunch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunch), a locally available limestone-based building material that was commonly used for constructing local churches and some Cambridge colleges. Originally the tower had a cap on top, onto which the sails were fixed. These were removed in the late-1950s as part of the conversion to a residential dwelling (see the picture gallery for more detail).

We currently have no record of what the inside of the mill looked like when it was in operation, but it was most likely something like the picture below.

Some bits of the old wooden machinery are still in evidence today, having been adapted into the living room in the converted windmill.