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Introduction
Early Days
Mr Waud's New Mill
Journey through the working mill
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Mr Waud's New Mill
Location: York
And so to the new mill at Holdgate in the year of 1770. The proud miller, builder and owner being Mr George Waud. The mill as we see it today would have looked different then. It was lower and not waisted, the five sails (making use of Captain Stephen Hooper’s roller reefing design similar to roller blinds), passing dangerously within a foot of the ground; hence the two diagonally opposed doorways. Adorned impressively by the Fantail (invented by Edmund Lee in 1745) making the cap and sails face into the wind, releasing the miller from the very real threat of the sails being ‘back winded’, possibly destroying the mill or needing extensive costly repairs.
The whole mill would have been black! The tower made from two and three quarter inch hand made bricks and then tarred, the sails, cap and fantail black lead painted to present an overall dark and mysterious structure very different from today’s fashion of black tower, white sails, cap and fantail.
George Waud must have been strongly influenced by the famous Yorkshire enginerer John Smeaton (1724 – 1792), incorporating a lot of his ideas into the mill; ironwork, ogee shaped cap, five sails (as opposed to even numbered sails, sometimes up to eight) and later on sailbacks (whips) are all Mr Smeaton’s work from his engineering experiments with wind power. Smeaton was born on the eighth of June at Austhorpe Lodge in the parish of Whitkirk (where he is buried) near Leeds. His grandfather was reputedly from York. He built the extraordinary Eddystone Lighthouse and was a prominent engineer of his day. I should think it realistic that he had a hand in the construction of Holgate Mill, living only a short distance away from it.
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