The Old Windmill Totternhoe · Bedfordshire · England

The Old Windmill at Stanbridge represents the later surviving windmill on a landscape with much earlier milling evidence. Bedfordshire Archives records a medieval windmill site about a quarter of a mile east of the present nineteenth-century mill. The earliest documented reference was in 1291, when an inquisition into the goods and land of John de Gatesden, Lord of the Manor, recorded a messuage and two parts of a windmill at Stanbridge.

Later references included a 1439 inquisition referring to the site of a windmill, a 1601 deed including a windmill in the occupation of William Seer, and a 1678 sale referring to the site upon which a windmill had lately stood. J. Steele Elliott recorded that the ancient mill stood on the opposite side of the road from the existing mill, with a defined mill mound still visible in 1931. The surviving brick tower mill was built for William Twidell early in 1800.

It passed to Christopher Buckmaster in the 1830s and was later in the possession of Sarah Buckmaster. Benjamin Mead was miller in 1848. The tower was built of narrow brick and stood about 42 feet to the top of the crown, measuring 23 feet 6 inches across the base with 24-inch brickwork.

It had four floors and two pairs of stones, was worked by fantail, and carried four sails, two with shutters and two with cloths. The mill ceased working about 1885, with William Symes recorded as the last tenant miller. In the 1920s the Rating and Valuation Act assessment noted it as a brick and tile derelict windmill owned by the Misses Buckmaster and occupied by G. T. Heady.

The mill had lost its cap by the time Bedfordshire Archives described it in its modern condition, and living accommodation had been added. Historic England lists it as The Old Windmill, a Grade II listed four-storey red brick tower mill with cap and gear removed, now used as a private house.