COUNTRY LIFE
ARE there any windmills in regular use in England ? The question is suggested by the news that recent scientific research advocates the revival of wind-power for various uses. There was one active windmill in Bedfordshire, as the county magazine records, up to 1916, and I have often watched them at work in Huntingdon and Cambridge ; and they were the making, or rather unmaking, of the Fens. They are said to have first come into use in the thirteenth century, and are sometimes associated with the first Crusaders. Watermills are a good deal older, of course. The Domesday survey is full of them ; and their departure is not so thorough. They began to cease to function much about the same time as the windmills did, and are miserably few. They were little goldmines, and what is more, enabled country dwellers, and gleaners, to live on locally grown corn. Happily, there is some little revival. There is, at any rate, one Domesday mill on the Lea eloquent in its internal structure of a historic past, that has been revived, thanks perhaps to the war ; and its old water-wheel grunts and groans in providing power for the grinding of food for poultry and pigeons. The consistent daily "gale warnings" from the B.B.C. may well remind us of the loss of wind-power. One suggestion is that the mills, like many boats, should have auxiliary engines to maintain continuity during the few periods of excessive calm. What a deal of cheap power goes to waste—in wind, in current and in tide! Some day we shall go back to the wisdom of the past, to the incidental revival of local self-sufficiency.
Previous page
