Melin Maengwyn Gaerwen · Isle of Anglesey · Wales

Melin Maengwyn stands at Gaerwen, set back from the north side of the A5 about 750 metres east of the new church of St Michael. It is a prominent tower windmill within the village and one of the surviving full-height windmill towers of Anglesey.

The windmill was built in 1802. A slate tablet above the north doorway records the date and the initials of H E Williams, the first of the Williams family to run the mill. Successive generations of the Williams family operated Melin Maengwyn, but they did not own it. The mill was once part of the Plas Newydd estate. The 1841 tithe map and apportionment recorded the land and mill as owned by Hugh Pritchard and occupied by Robert Hughes, while William Pritchard lived across the road at Tyn y Felin and was the actual miller. He ran the mill until his death in the 1850s.

About 1860 the mill was bought by Hugh Pritchard, a successful baker from Liverpool, and it remained associated with his descendants. In the later part of its working life the mill was operated with only two sails, with additional power supplied by a steam traction engine. This mixed use of wind and auxiliary power allowed milling to continue after the mill was no longer operating in its original full-sailed form.

Melin Maengwyn finally ceased working just after the First World War. During a storm, lightning struck the endless chain and fused the metal; strong winds then toppled the cap. The tower is now roofless and capless. It is a full-height four-storey circular tower with slightly tapering rubble-masonry walls, originally rendered, with opposing ground-floor doorways and upper windows with segmental heads formed of roughly hewn voussoirs. A large opening in the north-east side was made to remove the machinery. The mill was listed at Grade II in 1968 as a substantially intact Anglesey windmill tower and a prominent focal point within Gaerwen.