Sarre Windmill is a Grade II listed smock mill in Sarre, Kent

Sarre, Kent

Sarre is a village and civil parish in Thanet District in Kent, England. The village is a part of St. Nicholas-at-Wade ecclesiastical parish, after having lost the local church of St. Giles in Elizabethan times; the ecclesiastical parishes were subsequently combined. In its own right Sarre is an...

, England that was built in 1820, and is now a commercially working windmill that has been restored and is open to the public.

History

Sarre windmill was built in 1820 by the Canterbury

Canterbury

Canterbury is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour....

 millwright

Millwright

A millwright is a craftsman or tradesman engaged with the construction and maintenance of machinery.Early millwrights were specialist carpenters who erected machines used in agriculture, food processing and processing lumber and paper...

 John Holman. It was said to have been moved from Monkton

Monkton, Kent

Monkton is a village and civil parish in the Thanet District of Kent, England. The village is located at the south-western edge of the Isle of Thanet and is situated mainly along the B2047 road, leading off the A263 road between Canterbury and Ramsgate. The civil parish stretches south to the...

, but it is more likely to have had some machinery from that mill included in its construction. It was marked on the 1819-43 Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey , an executive agency and non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom, is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, producing maps of Great Britain , and one of the world's largest producers of maps.The name reflects its creation together with...

 map. Sarre mill was originally built with a single storey brick base, but in 1856 the base was raised to 14 feet (4.27 m) high, with an extra storey built under it. Sarre mill was the first windmill in Kent to have a steam engine

Steam engine

A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid.Steam engines are external combustion engines, where the working fluid is separate from the combustion products. Non-combustion heat sources such as solar power, nuclear power or geothermal energy may be...

 installed as auxiliary power. This was added in 1861. The mill was worked by wind until 1920, when the sails were taken down, and installed on the Union Mill

Union Mill, Cranbrook

Union Mill is a Grade I listed smock mill in Cranbrook, Kent, England which has been restored to working order. It is the tallest smock mill in the United Kingdom.-History:...

, Cranbrook

Cranbrook, Kent

Cranbrook is a small town in Kent in South East England which was granted a charter in 1290 by Archbishop Peckham, allowing it to hold a market in the High Street. Located on the Maidstone to Hastings road, it is five miles north of Hawkhurst. The smaller settlements of Swattenden, Colliers...

 and a gas engine

Gas engine

A gas engine means an engine running on a gas, such as coal gas, producer gas biogas, landfill gas, or natural gas. In the UK, the term is unambiguous...

 was fitted. The mill worked for a few years longer powered by the gas engine, but had ceased milling by the early 1930s.. The mill was recommissioned in the late 1930s, again powered by the gas engine, before finally stopping in 1940 as the engine had been damaged by frost in the severe winter that year. The mill was used as an observation post during the Second World War. The mill remained semi-derelict until 1986, when restoration was started, being completed in 1991 The mill is now open to the public as well as being a mill working for trade.

Description

Sarre windmill is a three storey smock mill on a two storey brick base. It has four double patent sails

Windmill sail

Windmills are powered by their sails. Sails are found in different designs, from primitive common sails to the advanced patent sails.-Jib sails:...

 carried on a cast iron

Cast iron

Cast iron is derived from pig iron, and while it usually refers to gray iron, it also identifies a large group of ferrous alloys which solidify with a eutectic. The color of a fractured surface can be used to identify an alloy. White cast iron is named after its white surface when fractured, due...

 windshaft. The mill is winded by a fantail

Windmill fantail

A Fantail is a small windmill mounted at right angles to the sails, at the rear of the windmill, and which turns the cap automatically to bring it into the wind. The fantail was patented in 1745 by Edmund Lee, a blacksmith working at Brockmill Forge near Wigan, England, and perfected on mills...

. The Brake Wheel is a composite one, with iron arms and a wooden rim. This drives a cast iron Wallower. The Great Spur Wheel is also of cast iron. The mill drives two pairs of millstone

Millstone

Millstones or mill stones are used in windmills and watermills, including tide mills, for grinding wheat or other grains.The type of stone most suitable for making millstones is a siliceous rock called burrstone , an open-textured, porous but tough, fine-grained sandstone, or a silicified,...

s, overdrift.

Millers

• Thomas Holman 1845 - 1862
• George Thomas Steddy 1878
• Ebenezer Wood 1880 - 1883
• Hogben
• Gambrill - 1940
• Malcolm Hobbs 1991 -
• Robert Hobbs 1991 -

References for above:-

External links

• Windmill World page on the mill.
• Local tourism information on Sarre Windmill