Site overview
Hulcote Windmill is a former tower mill at Hulcote, recorded by Windmill World as a truncated tower converted to a house. Bedfordshire Archives identifies the windmill as the Bedfordshire HER entry now called The Round House and records that two storeys of the tower survive, re-roofed and renovated. The wider mill site is close to Hulcote Mill, where Domesday records a mill in 1086, although that early mill would have been a watermill.
The later windmill is documented in relation to Hulcote and Aspley Guise, with a seventeenth-century reference to manors and mills in the area. Detailed construction and working dates for the surviving windmill have not been identified in the consulted sources. The present evidence supports a cautious record of a former tower mill reduced in height and adapted as a dwelling.
Map
History
Hulcote Windmill is recorded as a former tower mill in the historic county of Bedfordshire. Windmill World places the surviving mill at SP948382 and describes it as a truncated tower converted to a house. Bedfordshire Archives links the windmill to Bedfordshire HER entry 935 and records that it is now called The Round House.
The HER summary quoted by Bedfordshire Archives states that the remains of a tower mill survive, with two storeys re-roofed and renovated. The site belongs to a wider milling landscape at Hulcote, where Domesday Book recorded a mill in 1086; Bedfordshire Archives notes that this would have been a watermill because windmills were not known in England until later. The same local history account also records a common recovery of 1600 referring to manors and to three watermills and one windmill in Hulcote, Beadlow, Clophill, Maulden and Aspley Guise, demonstrating early documentary evidence for wind-powered milling within the wider area.
The precise construction date, working life, machinery, ownership, and closure date of the surviving Hulcote tower mill have not been established from the consulted sources. Mills Archive material identifies it as a wind-powered corn mill in Bedfordshire, while Windmill World and the Bedfordshire Archives account provide the clearest evidence for the present survival of the structure. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the windmill survived not as a working mill but as a reduced and converted structure.
Its most clearly evidenced current form is a re-roofed, renovated, two-storey remnant of a tower mill, now known locally as The Round House.
Timeline
Converted and renovated
Windmill documented in wider Hulcote area
Sources and records
Bedfordshire Historic Environment Record
Windmill World site entry
Mills Archive record