Cottingham Tower Mill Cottingham · Northamptonshire · England

Cottingham Tower Mill stands on a long-established milling site. A mill is recorded in Cottingham in the Domesday Book, though that reference probably relates to a watermill. By 1536, when Peterborough Abbey was dissolved and John Chambers became warden of Cottingham, the parish was recorded as having three mills: one horse-drawn, one watermill, and one windmill. The 1720 enclosure awards map shows a mill on the present site and names John Aldwincle as owner of the enclosure. The present tower mill probably dates from the late eighteenth century.

For much of the nineteenth century Cottingham Tower Mill worked with two pairs of stones, and the Aldwinckle family remained connected with milling in the area. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the mill lost its sails and possibly its cap, perhaps following a storm in 1895. George Atkins was the last recorded miller in Kelly's Directory of 1903. In 1934 the property was sold at auction for £5 and was described as a four-storey mill with workings inside. Plans were made to mount a water tank on the tower, but no installation is recorded. The millstones were removed before 1955, when Charlie Lawson bought the tower for £25, reduced it to three floors, made it waterproof, and used it mainly for radio storage. The tower survived a demolition proposal in 1972. In 1983 a planning application was submitted to convert the old windmill ruins into a house, and conversion work by the Clarke family began in 1986. The conversion was completed in July 1996, leaving the former tower mill as a domestic structure.