Heckington Windmill is the only eight-sailed tower windmill still standing in the United Kingdom with its sails intact.
Heckington is located between Sleaford and Boston in Lincolnshire, England. The mill stands very close to Heckington railway station, hence its name of the 'Station Mill' in the 19th century. The windmill is designated a Grade I listed building.
Construction
It was built in 1830 for Michael Hare to plans by millwright Edward Ingledew who also built, among others, Wragby tower mill in 1831, Waltham Windmill in 1837, and the former Pickworth tower mill. The tower is of red brick, the outer walls being tarred (provided with a black bitumen paint in order to keep moisture out). It was built as a five-sailed windmill (similar to Alford Windmill) with Sutton's single patent sails (15 feet tip-width and 12 feet heel-width) providing longitudinal shutters on both sides of the backs (36 feet in length). The mill has six storeys called "floors": ground floor, meal floor, stone (stage) floor, lower bin floor, upper bin floor (hoist floor), dust or cap floor.
History
The five-armed sail-cross drove three pairs of stones and milled grain for over 60 years. But Hare died before August 1834, and the mill owner's widow, Ann Hare (née Bonner) (1807-1879), was left with two young children, one a son (James b. 1831), she then married a local miller Sleightholme Nash (1769-1847) around 1836. The mill eventually passed to Joseph Nash (Sleightholme Nash's son by an earlier marriage) who became its last miller before its destruction in 1890. A tail-wind made the sails run backwards after the destruction of the fantail by lightning leaving the cap rotating uncontrolled, blew off the entire cap with the curb smashing it with parts of the upper gear and all five sails to pieces, and destroyed the tower rim. Nash abandoned the wrecked mill.
In 1891 John Pocklington of Wyberton mill had bought the eight-sailed mill cap with gear of the 78-year-old defunct Tuxford's mill (built in 1813 at Skirbeck by the Tuxford millwright family is an example of their fine work) for just £72 at auction in Boston without any plans (N.B. the cost of a tower windmill was £2,000 in 1830). As a condition of the deal, he had to remove all the machinery from the mill site, so he was in an urgent need for a suitable mill stump to mount the cap on, as he had no place to put his acquisition. He bought the wrecked Heckington mill, and, from 1891 until early 1892, he fitted the white onion-shaped and fantail-driven Tuxford's Mill cap to the Heckington Mill and set it working for the following 54 years. Later he installed a large circular saw-mill in a shed on one side, also driven by wind-power using line-shafts. It was used to make elm boards for coffins. John Pocklington was successful in milling, baking, building, sawing, and farming. In that time and even up to today the mill was also called the Pocklington's Mill.