Schoose Farm Mill Workington · Cumbria · England

Schoose Farm Mill stands within the model farm built at Schoose, Workington, for John Christian Curwen of Workington Hall around 1800. The farmstead was designed as a planned agricultural complex, with castellated architectural treatment and an irregular courtyard layout. The windmill formed part of a broader group of buildings that included adjoining barns, cow sheds, a mock curtain wall, a gatehouse, and a raised stack yard.

The windmill was not simply a landmark structure. It powered farm machinery and was used for threshing. A south-east view of Schoose Farm appeared in the second edition of Curwen's Hints on agricultural subjects and on the best means of improving the condition of the labouring classes in 1809. In his presidential address to the Workington Agricultural Society that year, Curwen explained that the choice had been between a fire engine and a windmill. The costs were nearly equal, but he considered the fire engine more dangerous. He described the windmill as capable of dressing in two hours as much or more than four horses could manage in a whole day, and said that he expected to use it for threshing on wet days when no other work could be done. He also credited the architect, Mr Dunn of Coldstream, with a well-constructed machine.

The listed complex is built mainly in calciferous sandstone rubble with flush quoins. The five-storey windmill adjoins a large two-storey barn with single-storey extensions. The farm buildings are linked by a polygonal mock curtain wall and a rectangular mock two-storey gatehouse, enclosing three sides of a courtyard. The windmill has tapering doorways on five levels and small tapering side windows, all set in stone surrounds with horizontal scoring. A simple string course is visible at second-floor level, with traces at first-floor level. The floors and sails have been removed, but traces of the wooden flooring structure remain, together with a blocked entrance to a stairway within the thickness of the wall.

The wider farm group adds substantially to the mill's significance. The barn retains a gable bridge-ramp entrance and slit vents, while the gatehouse and curtain wall give the complex its deliberately picturesque, castellated form. Immediately to the south-west, the raised stack yard was surrounded by about forty-five arched openings identified as stacks on an 1808 plan. The windmill, adjoining barns, gatehouse, and curtain wall were listed at Grade II* on 13 December 1985. The surviving tower is now bare and without machinery, but it remains a rare wind-powered element of an early nineteenth-century model farm.