Landewednack Windmill Landewednack · Cornwall · England

Landewednack Windmill stands at Windmill Farm on Lizard Downs, close to the southern end of mainland Britain. It is also known as the Lizard Windmill and Mount Herman Mill. The tower is one of Cornwall’s rare surviving windmill structures and is protected both as a scheduled monument and as a Grade II listed building.

The mill is shown on the Lanhydrock Atlas of 1695 as Old Windmill, indicating that the site was already established by the late seventeenth century. Later accounts place it within the manorial milling landscape of the Lizard and connect it with grain grinding. Cornwall Wildlife Trust material describes the first recorded lease for the mill as dating from 1755 and identifies it as a working mill until the 1840s. A sale notice in the Royal Cornwall Gazette of 11 September 1828 referred to associated buildings, and the mill was also described as being in working order in 1828.

The surviving tower is cylindrical and roofless, standing about 30 feet high. Its walls are about 4 feet thick and are built from large blocks of serpentine and elvan. The upper part of the fabric was later pointed in concrete to reduce deterioration. The original revolving roof and wind machinery have gone, and the tower’s later survival is that of a substantial masonry shell.

During the Second World War the tower gained a new defensive role. Predannack Airfield was active from 1941 to 1946, and the old windmill was used by the Home Guard as an observation post within the airfield’s defensive landscape. Pillboxes and other wartime remains survive in the wider reserve landscape.

By the twenty-first century the windmill had become a prominent historic feature within the Windmill Farm nature reserve. The Lizard Windmill Conservation and Environmental Education Project repaired and transformed the tower in 2015, providing a vantage point over the surrounding heathland and helping to address its heritage-at-risk condition. The restored tower now combines the visible form of a seventeenth-century Cornish grain mill with its later wartime and landscape-history associations.