Monument record MDR5602 - Ruined windmill, Windmill Farm,Ockbrook

At Windmill Farm, Ockbrook, is the low ruin of a brick-built windmill tower with 14-inch walls, two opposite doorways, two fireplaces and the remains of a staircase let into the inside of the wall. Pig sties have been built onto and inside the structure. There is a stump of a wooden shaft with an iron pinion in an adjoining field. This mill was mentioned by Farey in 1813. (1, 2) In 1995 the Ockbrook & Borrowash Historical Society requested that the windmill be listed, and collected various documentary references to the mill. These included a letter written in 1810, deploring the fact that the miller was working on Sundays, a report on the execution of two men in 1812 who had robbed the dwelling house at Ockbrook Mill, and a survey of 1826. (3) Ockbrook windmill lies just to the east of the village of Ockbrook, on Windmill Farm. This is named as such on the Enclosure Award map of 1773, although the windmill is not shown on Burdetts map of 1767. A parish survey of 1822 describes the farm as 'Brick and tiled Dwelling House, Stable, Drying Kiln, pigsty, also a brick-built windmill and a small barn in the field ..'. The tower mill was advertised for sale in 1833. The OS map of 1880 shows the mill to be disused. Reports and photographs dated about 1890 show that it was a four-storey brick tower mill, with a loading door on the first floor. There were only two sails shown but the iron canister was for four sails. The shuttered sails appear to have been sprung, there being no evidence of 'patent' equipment. The cap was boat-shaped, unlike most others in the area which tended to be ogee-shaped. The remains of the mill were painted in 1932, showing two floors of the brick tower remaining, to which was fitted a pitched roof, a door on the first floor closed off by a corrugated iron sheet and a stable type door swung open on the ground floor. Most of the mill has now disappeared and only the base of the tower survives. Currently the mill has been reduced to a brick annulus, about 14ft in height with no roof or covering such that rainwater can get into the walls. One of the millstones has been built into a path and a portion of another has recently been found in an adjacent hedge bottom. (4)