Maud Foster Windmill: Seven Storeys and Five Sails over Boston
On the eastern side of Boston, Lincolnshire, a slender brick tower rises seven storeys above the flat fenland, crowned with a gleaming white cap and carrying five sails instead of the usual four. This is Maud Foster Windmill, built in 1819 beside the drainage channel that gave it its name, and it is no museum piece frozen behind glass. The mill still turns, still grinds grain into flour, and still earns its keep the way its builders intended. Among the surviving windmills of England it stands out twice over: for its unusual five-sail configuration and for its remarkable height, which makes it one of the tallest windmills in the country still working by wind.
A mill built for merchants
Maud Foster Windmill was erected in 1819 for the brothers Thomas and Isaac Reckitt, who traded in grain and seed in Boston. They commissioned the millwrighting firm of Norman and Smithson of Hull, across the Humber in Yorkshire, to build them a tower mill of serious ambition. The timing made sense. The Napoleonic Wars had only recently ended, the fens around Boston had been progressively drained into some of the most productive arable land in England, and the town's port moved corn in quantity. A tall, powerful mill placed at the edge of town, beside a navigable waterway and close to the growing streets of Skirbeck, was a sound commercial proposition. What Norman and Smithson delivered was anything but a routine village corn mill: a towering brick shell with an elegant curved batter, engineered to carry heavy machinery and an exceptionally large sail span high above the surrounding rooftops.
Why five sails?
Almost every windmill image in the popular imagination has four sails, and most English mills did. Yet Lincolnshire became famous for experimenting with odd and extravagant sail counts: five-sailed mills survive in the county at places such as Alford and Burgh le Marsh, six-sailers were built, and Heckington still boasts England's only surviving eight-sailed tower mill. The logic behind five sails is smoother power. More sails sweep the wind more continuously, delivering steadier torque to the millstones than four can manage, while using less timber and iron than six or eight. The trade-off is maintenance: a four-sailed mill that damages one sail can remove the opposite one and keep running on a balanced pair, but a five-sailer has no opposite sail to remove. Lose one, and the mill must stop until repairs are made. That the owners of Maud Foster accepted this risk says something about the confidence of Lincolnshire millwrights, and about how much the steady, even grind of five sails was valued.
Seven floors of working machinery
The tower contains seven floors, and each had its role in a carefully arranged vertical production line. Sacks of grain were hoisted up through the mill by a sack hoist driven from the windshaft, so that the wind itself did the lifting. From the upper floors the grain descended by gravity: cleaned, fed into hoppers, ground between millstones on the stone floor, then sifted and dressed into grades of flour on the floors below, and finally bagged at ground level. At the summit sits the onion-shaped ogee cap, painted white in the classic Lincolnshire manner, which turns on a curb so that the sails can face the wind. A fantail mounted behind the cap does this automatically: whenever the wind shifts, the small vaned wheel catches it and winds the cap back into position. Inside, the windshaft turns the great brake wheel, which drives the wallower and the upright shaft running down the tower, distributing power to the stones and to auxiliary machines.
The drain and the name
The mill takes its name not from a miller or a miller's wife but from the watercourse it stands beside. The Maud Foster Drain is one of the many artificial channels that keep the low-lying land around Boston dry, part of a drainage system whose origins reach back to the sixteenth century. Tradition holds that the drain was named after Maud Foster, a local landowner across whose ground the channel was cut. Whatever the precise circumstances, her name passed first to the water and then, centuries later, to the windmill built on its bank. It is a very fenland kind of naming: in this engineered landscape, drains, sluices and banks are the fixed points of geography, and buildings take their identity from them. The pairing is also practical, since the waterway offered transport for grain and flour in the mill's early working life.
From Boston flour to a household name
The Reckitt brothers did not, in the end, make their fortune at the mill; the milling trade of the early nineteenth century was volatile, and the family's business ventures in Boston struggled. But the story has a remarkable sequel. Isaac Reckitt eventually moved north to Hull, where in 1840 he took over a starch works. From that modest beginning grew Reckitt and Sons, later Reckitt and Colman, one of Britain's great household-goods manufacturers - a company whose successor, known today simply as Reckitt, sells cleaning and health products around the world. Few working windmills can claim a direct link to a modern global corporation. The tall tower beside the Maud Foster Drain is, in a sense, the ancestor of brands found on supermarket shelves on every continent, a reminder that industrial empires often begin with grain, wind and a family willing to take risks.
Decline, survival and restoration
The twentieth century was cruel to English windmills. Steam, then roller milling, then electricity stripped away their trade, and thousands were left to lose their sails, their caps and finally their towers. Maud Foster worked by wind longer than most, but it too eventually fell quiet, and for decades its future was uncertain. Its salvation came through a combination of official recognition and private devotion. The mill is protected as a Grade I listed building, the highest grade in England, reserved for structures of exceptional interest. In the late twentieth century it was taken on by owners determined to see it turn again, and a painstaking restoration returned the sails, the cap and the machinery to full working order. What visitors see today is not a reconstruction or a shell but a genuine survivor, repaired with the same trades and materials that built it.
A working mill in the twenty-first century
Maud Foster is that increasingly rare thing: a windmill that actually mills. When the wind serves, the five sails turn and the stones grind wholemeal flour that is sold to bakers and home cooks, continuing a production line that began in 1819. Visitors can climb through the floors on open days, watching the machinery at work and feeling the whole tower tremble gently under sail - an experience no static museum can reproduce. From the upper windows the reward is a wide view over Boston, including the great medieval tower of St Botolph's Church, the famous Boston Stump, and the dead-flat fens stretching toward the Wash. Standing there, with the smell of ground grain in the air and the brake wheel rumbling overhead, you understand why people devote their lives to keeping such places alive.
Explore on the map
Maud Foster Windmill is one of hundreds of historic mills you can discover on our interactive map. Zoom in on Boston to find the five-sailed tower beside its drain, then pan across Lincolnshire to compare it with the county's other multi-sailed survivors, from Alford to Heckington. Every marker opens a window onto a story like this one - of wind, grain and the people who harnessed both.