A Windmill Tour of Lincolnshire: England's Tall, Many-Sailed Towers
Drive east from Lincoln towards the Wash and the land flattens into fen: drained fields, dead-straight watercourses, and a horizon broken only by church spires and windmill towers. Lincolnshire kept more of its great corn mills than almost any other English county, and it built them unusually tall and unusually well. This is the home of the five-, six- and eight-sailed tower mill — tarred black brick below, a white onion-shaped cap above, a fantail spinning quietly behind. A tour of these mills is a tour of English milling at its most ambitious, and the best of them can still be climbed from ground floor to cap. Several of them still grind flour by wind.
A county shaped for wind
Lincolnshire's geography made wind power the obvious choice. The southern half of the county is fenland, reclaimed marsh lying at or barely above sea level, and land that flat offers almost no falling water to drive a watermill. What it offers instead is grain in enormous quantity. The drainage and enclosure of the fens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned wet common into some of the richest arable soil in Britain, and every sack of wheat needed milling. Ports such as Boston moved flour and grain by water, so a mill within reach of a navigable drain had a ready market. Brick was cheap and local, big timber was not, which pushed millwrights towards brick tower mills rather than timber smock or post mills. And because the fens grow few trees, a tall tower could reach clean, steady wind in every direction. The result was a landscape where the windmill was not a picturesque relic but a serious industrial machine, worked hard and rebuilt bigger whenever trade justified it.
Smeaton's arithmetic: why more than four sails
Most English windmills carried four sails, one on each arm of a simple cross. In the 1750s the engineer John Smeaton — later famous for the Eddystone Lighthouse — carried out systematic experiments on windmill sails using a rotating test rig, and presented his findings to the Royal Society in 1759. Among his conclusions was that a mill with five sails could run more smoothly and deliver power more evenly than a four-sailed mill of similar sweep. Smoothness matters in a corn mill: steadier torque means steadier stones and better flour, and it allows one mill to drive several pairs of stones at once. There is a trade-off, though, and every Lincolnshire millwright knew it. A mill with an even number of sails can keep working with a damaged pair removed, running on the remaining opposite pairs; a five-sailed mill cannot be balanced with anything fewer than its full set. Even so, the county's millwrights — firms such as Saunderson of Louth among them — took up multi-sailed designs with more enthusiasm than anyone else in England. Lincolnshire became the heartland of the many-sailed mill, and the survivors show it.
Maud Foster Mill: five sails over Boston
Boston makes a natural starting point. The Maud Foster Mill, named after the drain it stands beside, was built in 1819 by the Hull millwrights Norman and Smithson, and it is a giant: seven floors of tarred brick carrying five patent sails and a gallery partway up the tower. Unusually, its sails turn clockwise when seen from the front, the opposite of most English mills. Maud Foster worked commercially deep into the twentieth century and, after restoration, has produced stoneground flour again in recent decades. Climbing it is the best introduction to how a tower mill actually works: grain hoisted to the top, cleaned and fed down by gravity through the stones, with the miller controlling everything between the wind above and the meal bins below. From the gallery you can see the tower of St Botolph's church — the famous Boston Stump — rising over the town, the other great vertical landmark of the fens.
Heckington: the last eight-sailed windmill
West of Boston, in the village of Heckington near Sleaford, stands the most extraordinary mill in Britain. The tower was built in 1830 and originally carried five sails, but a gale in 1890 wrecked its cap and sails. Rather than repair it as it was, a local businessman, John Pocklington, bought the remains and fitted the cap, cross and eight sails taken from a mill in Boston that was being dismantled. The result is the only surviving eight-sailed windmill in the country. Eight sails give an enormous working surface and remarkably smooth power, and the sight of all eight turning together is unlike anything else in English milling. The mill has been restored to working order and grinds flour when the wind serves; it stands close to Heckington's railway station, so it is one of the few great windmills you can visit easily by train.
Six sails at Sibsey and Waltham
Between five and eight sit the six-sailed mills, and Lincolnshire has the two finest. Sibsey Trader Mill, a few miles north of Boston, was built as late as 1877 by Saunderson of Louth — a striking date, because by then steam-driven roller mills were already spreading through the ports. That a brand-new, six-sailed tower mill still made commercial sense in the fens in the late 1870s says a great deal about how cheap and reliable wind remained out here. The Trader is now in the care of English Heritage, its slender tarred tower and white cap standing alone among the fields. Far to the north, at Waltham near Grimsby, another Saunderson six-sailer of 1880 survives in the middle of its village, maintained by a preservation society with a small museum alongside. Six sails offered a practical compromise: nearly the smoothness of Smeaton's odd numbers, but with the ability to run on four sails, or even two, if a pair had to come down for repair.
Moulton, Alford and the wider survivors
The tour could go on for days, because the county keeps rewarding you. At Moulton, near Spalding, stands a tower completed in 1822 that is often described as the tallest windmill in England, its cap roughly a hundred feet above the ground. It lost its sails in a gale late in the nineteenth century and worked on by engine power; after a long community-led restoration it carries sails again and welcomes visitors. At Alford, on the eastern edge of the Wolds, a five-sailed mill of 1837 built by the local millwright Sam Oxley dominates the little market town. Burgh le Marsh, on the road to Skegness, has another five-sailed tower whose sails, like Maud Foster's, turn clockwise. In Lincoln itself, Ellis Mill of 1798 is the last survivor of a line of mills that once stood along the windy limestone edge above the city, and at Wrawby, in the north of the county, the last Lincolnshire post mill still swings on its central post — a reminder of the older technology the great towers replaced.
Reading the Lincolnshire style
Once you have seen two or three of these mills, you can identify the county style at a glance. The towers are tall, slightly tapered and tarred black, a practical waterproofing for soft local brick that gives the mills their severe, striking silhouette. On top sits a white cap in the shape of an onion dome, usually finished with a small finial, quite different from the boat-shaped caps of Norfolk next door. A fantail — the small wind wheel mounted behind the cap — turns the whole cap automatically so the sails always face the wind, and the sails themselves are patent sails fitted with shutters, adjustable from inside the mill without stopping it. Many towers carry a gallery, a wooden balcony partway up, from which the miller could reach the sails. Everything about the design speaks of mills meant to be run hard by small crews, season after season, in a county where the wind rarely rests.
Explore on the map
Lincolnshire's mills sit close enough together that a weekend is enough for the highlights: Boston and Sibsey in a morning, Heckington in the afternoon, Moulton and Alford the next day. Every mill mentioned here, along with the county's smaller and lesser-known survivors, is plotted on our interactive map. Zoom in to eastern England, trace the black towers across the fens, and plan your own route from five sails to eight.