Mount Pleasant Mill

Mount Pleasant Mill worked by wind until 1933 and by a diesel single cylinder Crossley engine until 1973. Fred Banks, who ran it then, also owned Alford Windmill. It is the only windmill in the area beside Heapham Mill with original and unrestored equipment and machinery of the 1920s and 1930s. The original cap with the oak cap frame is still in place. The original windshaft, wallower, upright shaft and great spur wheel are made of cast iron, as are the tooth ring of the wooden brakewheel with its timber clasp arm construction and wooden brake, all installed in the 1930s. A refinement to the mill is the elevator to replace the old sack hoist which worked off the underside of the wallower by…

It was built in 1875 for miller Edric Lansdall as a four-patent-sailed, slightly tapering four-storeyed tarred tower mill with onion-shaped cap and fantail on top of the remaining roundhouse of a previously erected post-mill. The junction between the former roundhouse wall of hand-made bricks and the newly superimposed tower made of machine-moulded bricks is almost indistinguishable. On the second floor, the stone floor, originally three pairs of millstones (two pairs of peak stones (grey stones or greys) and one pair of quartzite (French stone)) were driven, of which only one grey pair remained. This peak stone is cut from rock millstone grit quarried in the Peak District of southwest…