Ingham Mill Farm Tower Mill Ingham · Norfolk · England

Ingham Mill Farm towermill was built around 1872 on the site of an earlier towermill. The earlier mill had been built around 1763, allegedly on the site of a postmill blown down in a gale, and was demolished around 1872 when the new Mill Farm tower was built. Norfolk Mills notes that although the later mill was named Ingham mill, it actually stood a few yards inside Sutton parish, close to Ingham and Stalham.

The later tower was a five-storey red-brick mill with staggered sash windows, forty-two feet high to the curb. It had two pairs of double-shuttered patent sails, struck by rack and pinion via a tail pole, driving three pairs of stones. One pair of sails had nine bays of three shutters; the other had the same arrangement except for four shutters on the innermost trailing edge. The Norfolk boat-shaped cap had a petticoat, gallery and six-bladed fan with the distinctive stripes of the Ludham millwrights Englands. Rex Wailes recorded an upright pine shaft, seventeen and a half inches in diameter below the great spur wheel and square above it, with sack-hoist gear driven from the underside of the wallower, and a wheat cracker and sifter.

In August 1872 the new-built mill was advertised to let at Ingham, with possession at Michaelmas. The notice described it as driving three pairs of stones, with an excellent dwelling house and 150 acres of fine arable land. In 1875 the associated farm, in the parishes of Ingham, Sutton and Stalham, was advertised for sale with a capital family residence, agricultural premises, about 155 acres of land and a wind flour mill in good working condition, then occupied by James Frosdick. Thomas Frosdick was recorded as miller in 1875, Henry Cook in 1878 and 1879, and Robert G. Gladden as farmer and miller in 1883. George Robert Gladden was listed as wind miller and farmer in directories from 1892 into the early twentieth century. Norman J. Goffin was listed as wind miller from 1922 to 1929 and as miller in 1933 and 1937.

The mill remained outwardly complete in 1937, when a Karl Wood painting showed it with cap, sails, fantail and chain pole. In May 1939 it still had cap, petticoat, fanstage, two sails with shutters in the first two bays, and two empty stocks. During the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, the Royal Observer Corps occupied the mill as the Stalham post and removed the cap and sails. Derek Wood later recorded that the Stalham post opened in 1934 and appeared to be Ingham mill, with the top seven feet renewed in modern brickwork without batter. The post was moved underground in 1959. The 1872 tower was therefore later heightened by a seven-foot wartime or observer-post alteration. By 1949 the tower remained but was truncated. Around 1982 the tower still stood, with forty-two feet of original brickwork and a seven-foot upper section in modern brickwork. It remained standing in 2004.