Paignton Windmill Paignton · Devon · England

Paignton Windmill stands on Windmill Lane and is also recorded as Fernacombe Mill. It was a tower corn mill and belongs to the group of former windmills around Torbay. The listed building is late eighteenth century in date and is built of purple limestone rubble with local red breccia dressings.

The tower is roofless, disused, and partly ruinous, but its historic form remains legible. It has a squat base and a sharply tapering circular tower of four storeys. The ground floor has a wide doorway facing the lane with breccia voussoirs, and there is internal evidence of a second doorway on the opposite side. The first floor has two opposed loading doors and two windows, the second floor has four windows, and the third storey has two windows. Some internal plaster survives, but the floors have been removed.

Specialist mill records identify the site as Fernacombe Mill, Paignton, and describe it as a tower corn mill dating from around 1800. The mill was photographed in June 1966 in the Muggeridge Collection and again in the early twenty-first century as the Old Windmill, Windmill Cottage, and Churscombe Windmill on Windmill Lane. Its listed name is Paignton Windmill, and it was designated at Grade II on 13 March 1951. The surviving tower preserves a substantial roofless remnant of Paignton's wind-powered corn-milling history.