Great Gransden Windmill Great Gransden · Cambridgeshire · England

Great Gransden Windmill is one of the most significant surviving post mills in England. It stands on Mill Road at Great Gransden as a post and open-trestle mill, the whole timber body turning around a central post to face the wind. The mill is associated with a deed date of about 1612, and the statutory listing describes it as the oldest remaining mill in England. Later dendrochronological work has refined that picture by showing that different timbers belong to different phases, with a main post possibly felled in the seventeenth century and other parts of the buck and windshaft belonging to later repair or rebuilding phases.

The mill retains important internal machinery. The listed structure has a two-storey body covered with tarred weatherboards, two pairs of over-driven Burr stones on the second floor, a sack hoist driven from a wooden pulley on the windshaft behind the tail wheel, and a flour-dressing machine on the first floor inscribed “IL 1774 RW”. These features preserve not only the form of the post mill but also much of its working arrangement.

The mill had stopped working by the early twentieth century, when it was already in poor condition. It was later acquired and preserved, and by the second half of the twentieth century it had become a nationally important survival. It was scheduled as Great Gransden Windmill and listed at Grade II* as Post Mill, Mill Road. Repairs were carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, but the condition of the structure again deteriorated.

A major repair programme was developed by Cambridgeshire County Council with grant support and specialist millwrighting input. Work in 2016–2017 addressed the buck, trestle, weatherboarding, roof covering, access steps, and tailstock, returning the mill to a safer and more weather-tight condition. The mill remains a rare survival of early timber windmill technology, with its machinery and repaired structure preserving a direct physical link with the wind-powered milling landscape of Great Gransden.