York is not short of images. The Minster, the City Walls, the Shambles, the pubs, the TikTok tourists queueing three hours to buy a ghost-shaped pepperpot.
But there are many lesser-celebrated, quirky things to marvel at. I list them on my Bizarre Sights Guide to York on this website. My favourite of the lot is probably Holgate Windmill: a five-sailed, working windmill marooned on a roundabout in the middle of a housing estate, which I rode to again today.
It’s just over a mile from the train station, conveniently cyclable (if you don’t mind the slightly hairy railway bridge on Holgate Road), and has cycle parking. It’s also – thanks to a team of volunteers – open regularly for visits (usually Wednesday and Friday mornings between 10am and 12noon, and Saturdays 10am to 4pm; see the mill website).
It’s also unique, perched on top of a modest hill in the middle of 1930s housing on a quasi-roundabout.
Not a real roundabout, mind: it’s not a junction, just a Polo mint-shaped bit of road. That didn’t stop Holgate Windmill landing the accolade of Roundabout of the Year in 2013 from the Roundabout Appreciation Society, no less. Whatever its technical status, on a bike you can pleasurably orbit the windmill as many times as you like.
Dropping in to the mill was a pleasure this sunny morning, and Matt the Miller gave us a compelling and intriguing guide to the building. It ground its first bag of flour in 1770, and was sketched by JMW Turner when he visited York in 1816. (Not especially well, if you ask me. Perhaps Joe was in a hurry to join the queue for those pepperpot ghosts.)
The mill was refurbed in 1860 before closing down in the mid-1900s, when the semis and bungalows sprang up around it. In the last decade and a half, however, it’s been fully restored, and produces authentic and traditional flour for sale for your home-made sourdoughs and cottage loaves. Much as it did through the 18th and 19th centuries, when every village had its own mill and Holgate was a hamlet outside York.
The whole top of the mill – twenty tons of cap, wooden sails and all – moves round to best align with the wind, thanks to the fantail at the back. This isn’t just for efficiency, but also safety. If the wind contrives to come at the sails in the opposite direction, they go round backwards and the mill explodes. You don’t want that.
There’s something very appealing about the clarity, the visibility of the windmill process. Of the nuts-and-bolts simplicity of grain arriving in bags (from a farm somewhere round Doncaster way: nobody was sure which one) and being ground into flour by sustainable wind power driving mammoth grooved stone slabs.
It’s a simplicity that was put to the test this morning: for some reason no flour was coming out, and it took a bit of laborious disassembly, cleaning up and reassembly. It wasn’t clear why it didn’t work before, but it worked after. Which may be a lesson for life: something about a daily grind. Maybe.
Like many kids of the 1960s and 70s, my only image of a mill came from the animated children’s TV series Camberwick Green. Windy Miller, the occupant of Colley’s Mill in said series, constantly risked a grisly death by sauntering through his front door as the sails scythed past him.
Well, don’t worry: real life mills like Holgate’s have a solution, in a simple but effective piece of technology.
A back door.