Little Rey Mill Brixham · Devon · England

Little Rey Mill stands on Windmill Hill in Brixham. The mill was built in 1797, during a period when several windmills were built in the district in response to wartime grain demand. It was a tower windmill and worked as a corn mill. The adjacent cottage is identified as the former mill house, keeping the relationship between the mill and its domestic working setting visible within the later townscape.

The mill was sold in working order in 1803, complete with its house and pigsties. It remained in use at least until 1835 and probably later. Historic mapping records the windmill in the nineteenth century, including John Wood’s 1842 Plan of the Town of Brixham and Environs. The working life of the mill appears to have ended after serious storm damage in 1870, when its sails and cap were said to have been blown off.

The surviving remains are the base of the former tower. The structure is circular and built of rubble, about 5.5 metres high, with walls more than 1 metre thick and an internal diameter of over 4.25 metres. Later building and ground-level changes around the site left the ground floor about 1.5 metres below the surrounding surface. The remaining tower base later housed an electricity transformer, marking a practical reuse of the old windmill fabric.

The remains were listed at Grade II under the name Base of Windmill Approximately 7 Metres East of No 25. Little Rey Mill now survives as a compact but important remnant of late eighteenth-century wind-powered corn milling in Brixham, preserving both the physical base of the tower and the place-name memory of Windmill Hill.