Ripple Windmill is a Grade II listed Smock mill

Smock mill

The smock mill is a type of windmill that consists of a sloping, horizontally weatherboarded tower, usually with six or eight sides. It is topped with a roof or cap that rotates to bring the sails into the wind...

 in Ringwould

Ringwould

Ringwould is a village near Dover in Kent, England. Ripple Windmill, which is being restored, lies within the parish....

, 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...

, 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...

  that was built in Drellingore

Drellingore

Drellingore is a village in South East Kent, England. It lies in the Alkham Valley an area of outstanding natural beauty between Folkestone and Dover. Although the Alkham Valley is a dry valley most of the surrounding land forms a water catchment area. Water is extracted from the chalk aquifer for...

 and moved to Ringwould in the early nineteenth century. Having been stripped of machinery and used as a television mast, it is now under restoration as a working windmill.

History

A windmill was marked on Robert Morden's

Robert Morden

Robert Morden was a British bookseller, publisher, and maker of maps and globes.He was among the first successful commercial map makers....

 map of 1695, a coastal map of Kent dated 1770 and 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. Ripple mill was built in the early nineteenth century at Drellingore, in the Hawkinge

Hawkinge

Hawkinge is a village and civil parish in the Shepway District of Kent, England. The original village of Hawkinge is actually just less than a mile due east of the present village centre ; the modern, much larger, village of Hawkinge was formed by the merging of Hawkinge and Uphill...

 parish. When the mill was moved, it was sectioned by cutting the cant posts in half lengthways, and bolting them back together at the new site. One such cant post can still be seen in the mill. A girl was killed by being struck by one of the sails, which came close to the ground, circa 1834. In 1895, Trinity House

Trinity House

The Corporation of Trinity House of Deptford Strond is the official General Lighthouse Authority for England, Wales and other British territorial waters...

 contributed towards repairs to the mill, which was marked as a navigational landmark. The mill lost two sails in 1927 and worked after that on the other two sails, assisted by an oil engine. The mill was working during the Second World War but in 1947 the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded by William Morris, Philip Webb and J.J.Stevenson, and other notable members of the Pre Raphaelite brotherhood, in 1877, to oppose what they saw as the insensitive renovation of ancient buildings then occurring in Victorian...

 decided not to issue an appeal to restore the mill due to a lack of local support. In 1955, the mill was acquired by Rediffusion Ltd

Rediffusion

Rediffusion was a business which distributed radio and TV signals through wired relay networks. The business gave rise to a number of other companies, including Associated-Rediffusion, later known as Rediffusion London, one of the first companies to win a terrestrial ITV franchise in the UK...

 and stripped of machinery. The smock was festooned with aerials and used as a television relay station. Rediffusion sold the mill in 1976. The new cap was placed on the mill in 1994, with the windshaft from Shiremark Mill, Capel, Surrey

Surrey

Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...

.

Description

Ripple Mill is a three storey smock mill on a single storey brick base. There is no stage. It has four single patent sails

Windmill sail

Windmills are powered by their sails. Sails are found in different designs, from primitive common sails to the advanced patent sails.-Jib sails:...

 and a Kentish style cap. The mill is winded by a fantail

Windmill fantail

A Fantail is a small windmill mounted at right angles to the sails, at the rear of the windmill, and which turns the cap automatically to bring it into the wind. The fantail was patented in 1745 by Edmund Lee, a blacksmith working at Brockmill Forge near Wigan, England, and perfected on mills...

. The mill had three pairs of millstone

Millstone

Millstones or mill stones are used in windmills and watermills, including tide mills, for grinding wheat or other grains.The type of stone most suitable for making millstones is a siliceous rock called burrstone , an open-textured, porous but tough, fine-grained sandstone, or a silicified,...

s, driven underdrift.

Millers

• John Mummery 1833 - 1849
• Henry Mummery 1845 - 1852
• William Mummery
• W Davison 1862
• Edwin Pope 1878
• Banks
• George Simpson
• John E Monins (died during WW2)

References for above:-

External links

• Windmill World page on the mill.