Hey Blog! This week is all about another local attraction, and another restoration project!
Heage Windmill is a rather special place. It is our local windmill, and the only working six-sailed stone tower windmill in the UK. It was built in the 1790s, so is nearly a quarter of a millennium old. Even though it has stood that long, it does still need repairs from time to time – and this is one such time! The rotatable cap has been temporally removed, and the sails have come off, and the society is in the process of making it good as new. Naturally, this needs volunteers, so we went along at the weekend to help!
Each windmill sail is made of wood and tough canvas, is painted white and weighs about a ton. The cap is more wood and more canvas, layered on top of each other, is on rollers so it can turn around the top of the tower, and is attached to the fantail which turns it to always face the wind. The cap is left for the professionals, who are going to coat it in some special stuff so it doesn’t get so bad. The fantail is already done. However, we were allowed to make a start on sanding the sails, which was very nice. If you remember from one of my first posts this year, I hand sanded the top of The Box, which took a long time and some aching arms, until Dad lent me the power sander. Unfortunately, there’s no sockets to plug it in at the windmill, so we had to do it all by hand.
We didn’t have to sand the canvas, but all the wood – and we only did the top and part on the sides of one sail! When you think there’s a whole morning’s work in sanding half a sail, then double it, add another morning for pressure-washing, and another for painting, times that by six, and you’ll see how much the people there are determined to make it go again. It looks really good when it’s all together, with a grey tower and a sparkling white cap. When the sails are stopped, the sail we were working on is one of the two horizontal ones – so when we go up the hill and look, we can proudly say “I helped repair one of those two there!”. The whole machinery inside is fantastic, and the mechanisms by which they all work is more than I can think of! How the original constructors could have thought up all these, then condensed them, and them made all of them fit together in a 15-foot diameter four-floor tower is beyond me!
This weekend, I have been doing some other stuff with other sails – moving about on the lake! At least, once the wind picked up! These sails work on slightly different procedure, for sailboats have only one triangular sail and it’s like an open sided bag. The windmill sails are more like wind turbine blades – they are slatted and have a taper to make the wind push them sideways rather than allowing for filling and escape of wind, and they have no dagger-/centre-board like boats have. Still, they both rely on the wind and it’s an interesting comparison!