There has been a mill here since at least c1477 but not this one, the one here now was built in about c1807 and ceased commercial milling in 1933 and was given to the care of the local parish council who restored to outer parts in 1937. Part of this was paid for by the Essex County council.
After the war further restorations were made, again by the parish council it had been given to their care by Lord Arran along with the playing field that adjoins the mill.
I chose a nice sunny Sunday afternoon to visit this mill, I nearly didn't as I had already been to Bocking and I thought they would all be the same, how wrong I was. The Round House was built as a sixteen sided polygon and not round and at one time in the past had had a thatched roof, this had been removed to stop any rat infestation and replaced with a more solid type. Yes, it drove two pairs of stones, but in a very different way, they were underdriven via the Great Spurwheel ( stones can be turned from above ( overdriven) or from below (underdriven)) by a small gear called the stone nut.
I was glad I had come almost everything about it was different except one thing, when I asked if I could video inside I could not believe that I would get the same reply as I had got at Stock, " of course you can, it could be here today and gone tomorrow " at least this time I new why.
In 1914 an additional pair of stones were fitted to be driven by a petrol engine housed in a small shed. There are two main types of stone, Granite usually from Derbyshire (Derbyshire Peak ) and French Burr a very hard stone found in Northern France, unlike granite French Burr millstones were made up of segments bonded together and then surrounded by steel bands.
I felt quite at ease inside this post mill as must the Annis Family that ran the mill through all its working days, it just felt more solid than Bocking even though it stood high up into the sky dwarfing everything around it.
The windmill was perched on a gigantic mound of soil that had been taken there from the once surrounding farm land, this was to give it additional height. On some post mills this allowed for a longer tail pole, to extend further and reduce the effort required by the miller to turn the mill body.
The miller had to swing several tons (tonne's) of building and its machinery around the centre pole to face the sails to the wind, this was quite hard work even for the best built miller, some millers of a slighter build used to keep a donkey to help with this task others even went a stage further and fitted up a form of winching mechanism 1others would enlist the help of other family members.
Soon after is second session of restoration the mill was struck by lightning, this is one of the reason why mills could be gone tomorrow due to fire. In 1956 the mill was passed from the parish to the county council.
When the old A12 passed through the village the mill was like a magnet attracting not only people that were interested in it for enjoyment, but also vandals, alas, as today in the 1960,s protecting this type remote building had its problems. It was during this era that a group of them broke into the mill and smashed every thing that was not indestructible. Over the following years the mill has been bought back into working order by the Essex County Millwright and a dedicated following of friends of the mill. A small amount of flour is milled here from time to time. Mountnessing is a great mill with a great and interesting history. A more technical account of this and other windmills can be found by clicking the information icon at the end of the page.
Armed with several publications purchased at Mountnessing I arrived home with a good evenings read ahead of me, within a few days I found myself in my local library trying to find as many books on windmills as I could.
With utter amassment I found out that there was another Post Mill at Aythorpe Roding and yet another one at Finchingfield. Plus four more Tower Mills in Essex and a Smock Mill at Uppminster that was once within the county.