Site overview
Siddington Mill is represented by the Round House, a Grade II listed round stone tower at Siddington. The structure is reputed to have been a windmill or possibly a folly, and is probably of late eighteenth-century date. Specialist mill records identify it as a tower corn mill, while the listing records a castellated round tower with battered rubble-stone walls, plat bands, an overhanging castellated parapet, and stone openings on three levels.
Historic map evidence places a windmill at the site in the early nineteenth century. By the later twentieth century the tower was semi-derelict, but the surviving shell remains a distinctive reminder of Siddington's former wind-powered milling landscape.
Map
History
Siddington Mill is the windmill identity associated with the Round House at Siddington. The surviving structure is a round stone tower, probably late eighteenth-century in date, and is protected as a Grade II listed building. It has long carried a degree of ambiguity in its architectural interpretation, being described as reputed to have been either a windmill or a folly, but specialist mill records identify the site as a tower corn mill.
The tower is built of rubble stone with battered walls, two plat bands, and an overhanging castellated parapet. Its openings are distributed across three levels, and the structure had already become semi-derelict by the time of the listed building survey in July 1985. Historic map evidence supports the windmill interpretation: a windmill was marked at this location on Bryant's map of 1824 and on the Ordnance Survey map of 1830. Local industrial archaeology work has also connected the tower with the late eighteenth-century landscape around Siddington and the Thames and Severn Canal.
The surviving tower no longer preserves a complete windmill form, and its cap, sails, windshaft, and working machinery have gone. Its significance lies in the survival of the masonry tower, which preserves the visible footprint and vertical form of a former tower mill or windmill-derived structure within the Siddington landscape.
Timeline
Round tower built
Windmill shown on map
Windmill mapped by Ordnance Survey
Semi-derelict tower recorded
Sources and records
Windmill World site entry
Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology article: Siddington Round Tower
Geograph record: Siddington Round Tower
Wikipedia article: Siddington, Gloucestershire