Charing Windmill is a Grade II listed house converted smock mill on Charing

Charing

Charing is a small village and civil parish in the Ashford District of Kent, in south-east England. The parish population is 2,750 ; it includes the settlement of Charing Heath.It is situated at the foot of the North Downs...

 Hill in Kent

Kent

Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

 in southeast England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. It is sometimes known as Field Mill, but that name was also used by a watermill in Charing.

History

Charing Mill was built in the early nineteenth century. It was marked on the 1819-43 Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey , an executive agency and non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom, is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, producing maps of Great Britain , and one of the world's largest producers of maps.The name reflects its creation together with...

 map and also on Greenwood's 1821 map of Kent. It was working until 1891, when the business was transferred to Field Watermill, although two new common sails had been erected on the mill by Holman's of Canterbury

Canterbury

Canterbury is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour....

 the year before. The sails were removed in 1917 after being damaged in a gale.

Description

Charing Mill is a three storey smock mill on a single storey base. It has a Kentish style cap. It had two Common sails and two Spring sails and was winded by a fantail.. The cast iron

Cast iron

Cast iron is derived from pig iron, and while it usually refers to gray iron, it also identifies a large group of ferrous alloys which solidify with a eutectic. The color of a fractured surface can be used to identify an alloy. White cast iron is named after its white surface when fractured, due...

 windshaft carries a wooden Brake Wheel driving a wooden wallower, carried on a wooden upright shaft. The Wooden clasp arm Great Spur Wheel survives, but the three pairs of millstones have been removed. The mill was originally painted white overall, but the body of the mill was creosoted in 1969.

Millers

• Thomas Parks 1823 - 1827
• Richard Chapman Jennings 1839
• A Sidders
• S Andrews
• Robert Millgate 1878 - Charing Heath windmill?
• Pay 1878 - 1892 Field watermill?
• Pope 1878 - 1892 Field watermill?
• William Smith
• George Smith 1887
• Walter Hicks 1891

References for above:-

External links

• Windmill World page on the mill.