Cann Windmill Cann · Dorset · England

Cann Windmill stood at Cann Mill, south of Shaftesbury, on the watermill site beside the Sturkel Brook. The windmill was not a surviving medieval or early modern Dorset mill, but a twentieth-century working reconstruction inspired by Portuguese tower-mill design. It was built between 1969 and 1971 by the well-known millwright Derek Ogden for Norman Stoate, whose family had taken over Cann Mill in 1947 after earlier milling at Watchet in Somerset.

The windmill was designed as a reduced-scale replica of an eighteenth-century Portuguese mill. It was built directly on the concrete roof of the modern watermill building, which had replaced an earlier mill destroyed by fire in 1955. The windmill used jib sails with triangular canvas sail cloths, giving it a very different appearance from the post mills and tower mills otherwise associated with Dorset. It was intended for commercial use and drove a pair of 3 feet 6 inch diameter millstones to produce wholewheat flour.

Cann Windmill gained wider attention in the 1970s. It was featured in the Observer on 16 April 1978 and was shown on Ordnance Survey mapping as a windmill. Drawings, photographs and associated material were deposited in the Mills Archive, including Derek Ogden’s material and a Goodrich Collection drawing that appears to show an earlier proposal for a windmill at Cann.

The windmill was taken down in 2008–2009 because of structural problems with the tower and the need to renew the timber cap and sail poles. Its machinery was stored on site in the hope that it might be rebuilt elsewhere. The site now represents a recent but distinctive chapter in Dorset milling history: a modern wind-powered flour mill built above an older watermill site, later removed after less than four decades of survival.