A Windmill Tour of Anglesey: The Stub Towers of Wales
Drive across Anglesey on almost any road and sooner or later a squat stone cone appears on a rise ahead: no cap, no sails, just a tapering cylinder of rubble masonry open to the sky. These are the stub towers of Ynys Môn, the remains of the island's once-thriving windmill industry. No other part of Wales embraced wind power on anything like this scale, and nowhere else in Britain offers quite the same experience of an entire milling landscape preserved in truncated form. This tour follows the towers across the island, from the one mill that still turns to the strangest tower of them all, high on a copper mountain.
Môn Mam Cymru: the island that fed Wales
Anglesey has carried the epithet Môn Mam Cymru — Môn, the Mother of Wales — since the Middle Ages, a name recorded by the twelfth-century chronicler Gerald of Wales. The claim behind it was agricultural: while the mainland across the Menai Strait rises quickly into the rocky heights of Eryri (Snowdonia), Anglesey is low, gently rolling and comparatively fertile. For centuries the island grew grain in quantities that mattered far beyond its own shores, with oats and barley dominating the fields alongside wheat. All of that grain had to be ground into meal and flour, and grinding needed power. On an island with modest streams and no mountain torrents, the answer, increasingly, was the wind.
Why Anglesey turned to the wind
Water power came first here, as it did almost everywhere, and Anglesey had watermills on its small rivers long before the first tower mill rose. But the island's geography set hard limits. Its streams are short and slow, prone to shrinking in dry summers, and there was simply not enough falling water to serve every parish. What Anglesey has instead is wind, and plenty of it. Sitting in the Irish Sea off the northwest corner of Wales, exposed on every side, the island catches weather systems rolling in off the Atlantic with very little in the way of shelter. The low, open terrain that made the land good for grain also made it superb for windmills: a tower on even a slight rise commands a clean sweep of wind from every direction. From the eighteenth century onwards, landowners and millers invested in wind power with real enthusiasm, and tower mills multiplied across the island's parishes. Surveys of the island's industrial heritage record around fifty windmill sites on Anglesey — a remarkable density for a Welsh county, and the reason so many stubs survive today.
Stone towers, Welsh names
The Anglesey windmill was, almost without exception, a masonry tower mill. There was no tradition here of the timber post mills familiar from the English lowlands; the island built in stone, using local rubble bound with lime mortar, and the results were massive, tapering towers with walls thick enough to shrug off Irish Sea gales. Many were limewashed white or tarred dark against the rain. On top sat a rotating cap carrying the sails and the windshaft, which could be turned so that the sails always faced the wind. Inside, the layout followed the classic pattern of the corn mill: grain hoisted to the top floor, fed down through hoppers to the millstones, and collected as meal on the floor below.
The names of these mills are part of their charm. Melin is the Welsh word for mill, and the island's towers carry names like Melin Llynnon and Melin y Bont — names that tie each tower to its farm, its bridge, its township. Even where a tower has crumbled to a shell, the name often survives on the map, in a farm name or a house name, keeping the memory of milling alive in the language of the island.
Melin Llynnon: the last mill still turning
One Anglesey windmill escaped the fate of all the others. Melin Llynnon at Llanddeusant, in the northwest of the island, was built in the 1770s as a corn mill and worked through the great age of Anglesey milling. Like its neighbours it eventually fell silent and decayed, but in the late twentieth century the local authority took it on and restored it completely: tower, cap, sails, machinery and all. Since its restoration in the 1980s it has been celebrated as the only working windmill in Wales, grinding stoneground wholemeal flour by wind power just as its first millers did.
A visit to Llynnon is the essential first stop on any windmill tour of Anglesey, because it shows you what every stub tower on the island once looked like. The gleaming white tower, the cap, the four great sails, the rumble of the stones when the wind is right — all of it makes the truncated towers elsewhere suddenly legible. The site adds another layer of history too: reconstructed Iron Age roundhouses stand in the mill's grounds, a reminder that people have been farming this corner of Anglesey for thousands of years before the first sail turned.
The five-sailed tower on Parys Mountain
Not every Anglesey windmill ground corn. On the summit ridge of Parys Mountain, near Amlwch in the northeast of the island, stands the shell of a windmill built for an entirely different master: copper. In the late eighteenth century Parys Mountain was one of the most productive copper mines in the world, and its workings ran deep enough to flood. In the nineteenth century a windmill was raised on the summit to help pump water from the mine, working alongside steam power. Unusually for Britain, it carried five sails rather than four. The mill's machinery is long gone, but the gaunt stone tower still crowns the mountain, standing over a lunar landscape of ochre, rust and purple spoil. It is the most dramatic windmill site in Wales, and arguably one of the most dramatic anywhere.
How the sails stopped
The decline of Anglesey's windmills followed the same script as almost everywhere in Britain, only with a coastal twist. From the late nineteenth century, cheap imported grain arrived by ship and rail, and large steam-driven roller mills at the ports could produce fine white flour at prices no village windmill could match. One by one the island's mills lost their trade. Gales took their toll too: a damaged cap or a shattered sail was expensive to repair, and when the income no longer justified the cost, millers simply let the wind win. By the early twentieth century milling by wind had effectively ended on Anglesey. Caps and sails, being timber, rotted and fell or were removed; the stone towers, built to last centuries, stayed put. That is why the island's signature ruin is the stub: a truncated cone, sometimes with its doorway and windows gaping, sometimes neatly capped with a flat roof and converted into a house, holiday cottage or farm store.
Touring the stubs today
The pleasure of a windmill tour of Anglesey lies in the hunting. Start at Melin Llynnon to see a complete mill, then let the stubs guide you around the island: towers stand near the lanes around Llanddeusant and the farmland of the interior near Llangefni, along the routes toward Holyhead in the west, and up the coast toward Amlwch and Parys Mountain in the northeast. Some stand proud on hilltops and announce themselves from miles away; others hide behind farm buildings and reveal themselves only at the last bend. Many are on private land, so enjoy them from roads and public footpaths — the Wales Coast Path around the island offers several fine sightings. Bring an Ordnance Survey map and look for the word melin: it rarely lies.
Explore on the map
Every located windmill on Anglesey — from the working sails of Melin Llynnon to the wildest ruined stub — can be browsed on our interactive map. Zoom in on the island to see how densely the towers cluster on this small patch of Wales, plot your own route between them, and click each marker for details of the site. Then click outward and compare Anglesey's stone stubs with the windmill landscapes of the Netherlands, Denmark or Greece: few comparisons show more clearly how one island made the wind its own.