Melin Cefn Coch Cefn Coch · Isle of Anglesey · Wales

Melin Cefn Coch stands in an isolated rural location near Cefn Coch, set back from the north-west side of the A5025 between Llanfaethlu and Cemaes Bay. It is the truncated remains of a former windmill tower, built of narrow slabs of local stone.

The mill was probably built in the mid eighteenth century and is known to have been working in the late eighteenth century. John Prichard was miller before 1794. In 1832 the mill was mentioned in a court case between two branches of the Meyrick family concerning ownership of the part of the Cefn Coch estate surrounding the windmill. By the 1842 tithe schedule for Llanfechell, the mill formed part of the Cefn Coch estate owned by Edmund Edward Meyrick Esq and was worked by Hugh Rowlands, one of the Rowlands family of Anglesey millers. Rowlands also farmed more than 32 acres.

Local history records that by the early 1840s Hugh Rowlands gave his occupation as farmer rather than miller, suggesting that the windmill formed part of the farmstead economy. By the 1850s Hugh Hughes was farming at Melin Cefn Coch, followed by his widow Ann and their son Thomas from the 1860s into the 1890s. Thomas's widow Ann later took over. By 1911 the mill house was unoccupied. The mill was probably out of use before 1901, when estate sale documents for the adjacent Tyn-y-Felin described it as the old windmill.

The surviving structure consists of the lower part of a circular sloping tower wall. It has opposing doorways with cambered heads of rough-hewn voussoirs and a small square opening above the southern doorway. No fittings remain. The tower was said by its owner in 1975 to have been in the same condition for as long as anyone could remember. Melin Cefn Coch was listed at Grade II in 1970 as the remains of an eighteenth-century windmill tower that once formed part of the Cefn Coch farmstead group.