Lacey Green, Buckinghamshire

Up in the windI’ve featured a number of windmills on this blog, because they fascinate me as ingenious structures in which a distinctive architectural form is well adapted to do the job it needs to do – housing heavy machinery such as large rotating millstones and supporting a set of sails that harness the power of the wind. There needs to be a means of pointing the sails in the right direction, so that they catch the breeze, and the whole structure has to be at once robust, to withstand the considerable forces exerted by the mechanism, and lightweight, as at least part of it has to rotate. From conical brick tower mills, with their rotating caps, to wooden post mills, the whole of which can be rotated by hand, windmills do this job elegantly. There’s another type, a kind of wooden tower mill, that’s polygonal with a turning cap that often looks rather like an upturned boat. This sort is known as a smock mill* and one of the best preserved examples is the octagonal one at Lacy Green…