Melin Drylliau Church Bay · Isle of Anglesey · Wales

Melin Drylliau stands near Rhydwyn, set back from the track leading towards Church Bay or Porth Swtan. Its elevated coastal position meant that it served not only as a corn mill but also as a visible landmark for sailors. The windmill was marked on sea charts in 1840 and 1881, the later chart naming it Rhyddlad Mill after the parish of Llanrhyddlad.

The tower is identified in the Cadw list description as an early eighteenth-century windmill, while local history places its likely origin in the early nineteenth century. In the 1840s the land on which the mill stood was owned by John Williams, with William Rowlands recorded as tenant. Rowlands farmed more than 20 acres and became the founder of a major Anglesey milling family. His sons and grandchildren later worked at windmills and watermills across the island.

After William Rowlands died in 1877, the mill and farm were run by his son Richard, assisted by his brother John. The freehold was auctioned in 1879, but the Rowlands family continued to work the property. After Richard's death in the 1890s, John Rowlands and his son Rowland William Rowlands ran the mill and renamed it Caerau Mill. In 1911 Rowland's young son William Rees Rowlands was killed at the mill when he was struck by a rotating sail. The windmill was gutted by fire in 1914. Rowland William Rowlands continued trading as a corn merchant from the adjacent granary and his nearby house, Glanywerydd.

The surviving tower is a circular tapering structure of rubble masonry, four storeys high, with much of the walling almost complete. It has window openings in the upper storeys and ground-floor doorways with rough-hewn voussoirs to cambered heads. The mill is capless and no longer retains its working machinery. It was designated Grade II in 1971 as a good windmill tower and as one of the surviving examples of Anglesey's former windmill landscape, with additional interest from its connection with the Rowlands family of millers.