Carlyon Hill Mill St Minver Highlands · Cornwall · England

Carlyon Hill Mill stands north-east of Carlyon in St Minver Highlands, above the Camel estuary. The windmill is formally listed as Windmill 350 Metres to North East of Carlyon, and specialist mill sources also identify it as Cant Windmill, Carlyon Windmill or Trevelver Windmill. Its current survival is the stone tower of a former tower mill, roofed flat after the loss of its original windmill cap and machinery.

The mill belongs to the older group of Cornish tower mills. A windmill is shown in this location on a painted panel of about 1690 kept at Trevelver, and local heritage accounts describe Carlyon Hill Mill as a seventeenth-century circular stone rubble tower. Douch’s account also records a new-built windmill near Trevelver being advertised in 1769. The structure was later shown on Martyn’s map and subsequent Ordnance Survey mapping, confirming its continuing visibility as a fixed landscape feature.

The surviving tower stands about 30 feet high. Its walls are about 3 feet thick, built in dry masonry with evidence that the exterior was once plastered. The tower has the usual opposed doorways with small windows above, and the original wind-powered working parts have gone. Its position on high ground made it a conspicuous landmark along the Camel estuary.

The windmill was first listed at Grade II on 6 June 1969, with the listing amended on 26 June 1987. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century photographs record the tower as a ruined but standing feature near Carlyon Farm, in open pasture and visible from the surrounding estuary landscape. The site’s significance lies in the survival of an early Cornish tower mill shell, its documentary presence in maps and visual records, and its continuing role as a landmark in St Minver Highlands.