Windmill Tower to W of Llancayo House Llancayo · Monmouthshire · Wales

The Windmill Tower to W of Llancayo House stands in a field near Llancayo, west of the road to Usk and north-west of Llancayo Farm. It is one of the most imposing surviving windmill towers in Wales. The tower was erected as part of the early nineteenth-century agricultural improvements on the Llancayo Estate and was built for Edward Berry of Llancayo, who died in 1818.

The tower was already present by 1813, when it was marked on sketch maps for the Ordnance Survey. In 1819 it was described as a noble windmill recently erected and capable of grinding 100 sacks of flour weekly. Despite its scale, the working life of the mill was short. It appears to have burnt down about 1825 and was marked as ruined on C. and J. Greenwood's map of 1830. On the 1842 tithe map it was shown only in outline.

The surviving structure is a very large tapering conical tower of rubble stone, originally rendered, with an attached roofless mill building to the north. The tower has projecting stringcourses, a coursed rubble plinth, cambered openings with stone voussoirs, and evidence for four or five former floor levels. The interior retains joist holes for the missing floors. Coflein records the tower as measuring about 8.5 metres in diameter at ground level and standing about 17 metres to the top of the stone tower.

The tower later underwent repair and conversion. By 2008 the five-storey tower had recently been repaired and converted into accommodation, with a replacement first-floor external gallery. The adjoining two-storey building to the north, probably associated with oats drying, had also been converted to accommodation. A new cap and sails were being installed. The tower was listed at Grade II in 1985 as a prominent early nineteenth-century windmill tower and as a significant landmark survival of the Llancayo Estate improvements.