Enville Common Windmill, Mill Lane, near Kinver, Staffordshire
Standing alone on an exposed rise overlooking Enville Common, the remains of an old windmill form a distinctive landmark. Its roof and sails have disappeared, leaving a three-storey brick tower, patches of deteriorating render and fragments of timber and machinery at its summit. Once a working structure defined by movement, it has become an imposing, motionless presence in the landscape.
The windmill was built around the turn of the nineteenth century and is believed to have remained operational until approximately 1870. It originally carried four sails, a boat-shaped cap and a fantail that helped keep the sails facing the wind. Such mills were an important part of the agricultural economy, using wind power to turn heavy machinery and grind grain into flour. Their usefulness depended upon skilled millers, favourable conditions and a close relationship between the rhythms of nature and the demands of farming. As milling became increasingly mechanised and centralised, many smaller rural windmills lost their commercial purpose. The surviving tower at Enville was recognised as Grade II listed in 1987.
There is something revealing about the contrast between the permanence of the building and the disappearance of everything that made it useful. The tower was constructed to support a complex mechanical process, yet today it survives principally because of its historical and architectural interest. Its sails no longer turn, its machinery no longer works, and the livelihood it once supported has vanished. The wind, however, remains unchanged. What has disappeared is not the natural resource upon which the mill depended, but a particular human ability to harness it — a reminder that even established ways of life can become obsolete within a few generations.