The Round House Woburn · Bedfordshire · England

The Round House, Woburn, is the surviving converted base of a former smock windmill. The Bedfordshire HER records the official heritage name as The Round House, formerly Windmill Cottage, and identifies it as a Grade II listed building. The original windmill stood west of Woburn: J. Steele Elliott noted that a map of the Manor of Woburn by Jonas Moore recorded Mill Hill as a close lying a quarter of a mile west of the town on the south side of the road leading to Heath and Reach.

The detailed working history of the smock mill has not been identified in the consulted sources, but Windmill World records the site as a corn smock mill with the base remaining and converted to a house. The conversion is unusually well documented in estate papers. The HER records a plan and elevation for a cottage to be made from the lower part of Woburn Windmill, with two bedrooms over the lower rooms.

An estimate for converting the windmill to a cottage is dated 1805 and quoted a price of £67. Estate cash books record conversion work between 1805 and 1820. The Grade II listing description records the former base of the smock windmill converted in 1805 to 1820 into a picturesque cottage for John, 6th Duke of Bedford.

The building is of coursed ironstone, or coursed limestone in the NRHE description, with some repairs in brick, all colourwashed. It has a pyramidal clay tile roof with some fishscale tiles, one storey and attics, and an octagonal plan. The south-east elevation has a part-glazed door in a cambered-headed opening, while a three-centred arch above preserves evidence that the opening may have been open before conversion.

Other elevations have round-arched recesses, with casement windows in several of them, and the south-west and north-east elevations have semi-circular eyebrow dormers. A central brick chimney stack and an early twentieth-century single-storey slate-roofed addition are also recorded. The building was included on the list as an architectural curiosity and survives as a domestic conversion of windmill fabric rather than as a working mill.