Skidby Windmill: The Last Working Mill of the East Riding
Drive the road between Hull and Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire and you cannot miss it: a tall brick tower tarred jet black, crowned with a gleaming white cap and four white sails, standing over the village of Skidby on the lower slopes of the Yorkshire Wolds. This is Skidby Windmill, built in 1821, and it holds a distinction that makes it far more than a pretty landmark. It is the last working windmill in the old East Riding of Yorkshire — a region that was once thick with mills — and on milling days its sails still turn and its stones still grind flour, just as they have for two centuries.
A mill built for grain country
To understand why Skidby Windmill exists, you have to understand the landscape around it. The Yorkshire Wolds are a crescent of rolling chalk hills, and for centuries their well-drained slopes have grown wheat, barley and oats in abundance. All that grain had to be ground somewhere, and before steam and electricity the answer was wind. The East Riding, low-lying and open to breezes rolling in from the North Sea and across the Humber, was ideal windmill country. In the nineteenth century, mills of every type — post mills, smock mills and brick tower mills — dotted the region, serving villages and market towns alike. Skidby, sitting between the market town of Beverley and the port of Hull, was perfectly placed: grain came off the Wolds, flour went down the road to a fast-growing industrial city. The mill was a business proposition first and a landmark second, and that commercial logic kept it alive long after most of its neighbours had gone.
Built in 1821 by Hull millwrights
Skidby Windmill was erected in 1821 by Norman and Smithson, a firm of millwrights based in Hull. Millwrighting was a demanding trade that combined the skills of the carpenter, the mason and the engineer, and the firms of the Humber region were among the busiest in the country during the great age of English corn milling. What they raised at Skidby was a tower mill: a tapering brick tower with a rotating cap on top, an arrangement that had largely superseded the older post mill, in which the entire body of the mill had to be turned to face the wind. The tower's brickwork was coated in black tar to keep the weather out — the treatment that gives Skidby its dramatic silhouette to this day — while the cap, sails and fantail were painted white. The contrast of black tower and white top is characteristic of mills in this part of England and makes Skidby instantly recognisable from miles away across the flat farmland towards the Humber.
How the machinery works
Skidby is a fine textbook of nineteenth-century milling technology. Its four sails are patent sails, a self-regulating design in which hinged shutters — rather like a venetian blind — open and close automatically as the wind strengthens or eases, so the miller no longer had to stop the mill and adjust canvas by hand. At the rear of the cap sits a fantail, a small wind wheel mounted at right angles to the sails. Whenever the wind shifts, it strikes the fantail, which turns gearing that slowly rotates the whole cap until the sails face squarely into the wind again. Inside, the power of the turning sails passes down a massive upright shaft through a series of gears to drive pairs of millstones, along with sack hoists and other machinery. Grain is hauled to the top of the mill, cleaned, and fed down between the stones, where the runner stone revolves above the fixed bedstone and shears the grain into meal. Gravity does much of the work: the building is, in effect, a vertical production line powered entirely by moving air.
The Thompson century
For most of its working life Skidby Windmill was a family concern. From the middle of the nineteenth century the mill was run by the Thompson family, who operated it for generation after generation and built it into a substantial rural business. Around the tower grew a range of warehouses and outbuildings, reflecting a trade that went well beyond grinding a few sacks for local farmers. The Thompsons adapted as the milling industry changed around them. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, huge steam- and later electricity-driven roller mills in the ports took over the production of white bread flour, undercutting wind millers everywhere. Like many surviving mills, Skidby shifted its output towards animal feed and other products for the surrounding farms, and in time auxiliary engine power supplemented and then replaced the wind. It was this willingness to adapt — unglamorous as feed milling may sound — that carried the mill through decades in which windmill after windmill across the East Riding fell silent, lost its sails, or was pulled down altogether.
Decline, rescue and restoration
By the middle of the twentieth century the age of commercial wind milling in England was effectively over, and Skidby could easily have followed its neighbours into ruin. The old East Riding once counted its windmills in the hundreds; today most survive, if at all, as truncated towers converted into houses or left as roofless shells. Skidby escaped that fate because people chose to save it. The mill passed from the Thompson family into public ownership, and in the 1970s it was restored to full working order, its cap, sails and fantail renewed so that it could once again grind grain by wind power. The building is protected as a Grade II star listed structure, a formal recognition of its special architectural and historic interest. Restoration of a windmill is never a one-off event, though: sails, shutters and cap timbers live a hard life in the Yorkshire weather, and keeping Skidby working has required repeated campaigns of repair by millwrights carrying on the same trade as Norman and Smithson two centuries ago.
A working museum of rural life
Today Skidby Windmill is cared for by the local authority and houses the Museum of East Riding Rural Life. The pairing is a natural one. The mill itself is the star exhibit — visitors can climb through its floors, follow the machinery from cap to ground level, and on good days watch the sails drive the stones — while the surrounding warehouse buildings display collections that tell the wider story of farming and village life in this corner of Yorkshire. Crucially, Skidby is not a static monument. It remains a working mill, producing stone-ground flour that is sold to visitors, which keeps alive not just the machinery but the skills needed to run it. A windmill only truly survives when someone knows how to set its sails, judge the wind and dress its stones, and Skidby is one of the places in England where that knowledge is still exercised rather than merely described on an information panel.
Why Skidby matters
Every surviving windmill is a small miracle of persistence, but last-of-their-kind mills carry a special weight. Skidby is the East Riding's sole remaining link, in working form, to a technology that fed the region for centuries. It shows what a complete mill looks like: not just a tower, but sails, fantail, machinery, stones and the ancillary buildings of a real business. For anyone interested in industrial heritage, it also poses the essential question of preservation — whether to freeze a historic machine or keep it running and accept the wear. Skidby's custodians chose motion, and the sight of its sails turning above the black tower is the best argument for that choice.
Explore on the map
Skidby Windmill is one landmark among thousands in our worldwide database of windmills and historic mills. Open the interactive map to find Skidby in the East Riding of Yorkshire, then zoom out to see how England's surviving tower mills, post mills and smock mills are scattered across the countryside — and how far you would have to travel to find another one still grinding by wind.