Great Chishill Windmill Great Chishill · Cambridgeshire · England

Great Chishill Windmill stands on Barley Road to the south of Great Chishill. It is an open-trestle post mill, a type in which the whole body of the mill turns on its central post. Its most distinctive feature is the fantail, which automatically turns the mill towards the wind. This makes it an exceptional survival among the small number of open-trestle post mills remaining in Britain.

The present mill was built in 1819 during the reign of George III. It incorporated timbers from earlier mills, including material associated with an earlier eighteenth-century mill, and local accounts also record older reused timbers. The site therefore preserves both the nineteenth-century rebuilt mill and fabric from earlier phases of milling at Chishill.

The mill worked as a corn mill and remained in use into the mid twentieth century. It last worked in 1951. By the late 1950s it was already a recognised historic feature of the village, and restoration was carried out in 1966 by R Thompson & Sons, millwrights of Alford in Lincolnshire. That campaign preserved the mill as a standing post mill after the end of its working life.

The later history of Great Chishill Windmill was shaped by local preservation. The Great Chishill Windmill Trust took over the mill in 2011. With support from the village, Historic England, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Trust undertook a major restoration. The work led to the mill's reopening on 8 June 2019, an event attended by villagers and supporters and associated with a reported £110,000 restoration. The Trust continues to maintain the mill and presents it as one of the defining landmarks of Great Chishill.