Pitstone Windmill Pitstone · Buckinghamshire · England

Pitstone Windmill is one of the best-known surviving post mills in Buckinghamshire. It stands in the north-eastern corner of a large field near the boundary between Pitstone and Ivinghoe, and its identity is consistently recorded by the National Trust, Windmill World and mill-history sources as Pitstone Windmill. The date 1627 is carved on part of the framework, and this is generally used as the earliest evidenced date for the mill, although the structure would have required repair and renewal through its working life.

The mill was built and used as a corn mill, with the wooden body carried on a central post and turned to face the wind by a tailpole. The machinery was housed in the rotating body, reached by external steps, with the post rising from a brick roundhouse beneath. The mill served the local farming landscape for almost three hundred years.

Its working life ended after severe storm damage in 1902, when the structure was left beyond economic repair as a commercial mill. The Hawkins family were unable to save it as a working concern and in 1937 L J Hawkins of Pitstone Green Farm gave the windmill and access to it to the National Trust. Substantial preservation work did not begin immediately.

In 1963 local volunteers began a restoration campaign, raising funds and supplying labour to repair and conserve the structure. In 1970 the mill ground corn again after a long interruption, marking the recovery of at least some functional capability. Today Pitstone Windmill is preserved by the National Trust as a historic windmill and visitor site.

It retains the essential form of a post mill, including the central post, brick roundhouse, external steps, tailpole and sails, and remains a prominent rural landmark in the Chilterns countryside.