What’s inside Little Marton Windmill?

Ground floor

Entrance

The only real millstone we have. Now set into the floor, it is a particularly coarse stone, used to grind animal feed in the latter years of the mill’s use.

Accessible  toilet

Kitchen, to provide light refreshments for our guests.

Video presentation, a description of the upper levels for those who may not want to climb the stairs.

Souvenir sales, a selection of low priced, unique items, all with a windmill connection.

First Floor

The Fylde windmill history exhibition. A display of historic documents, photographs and models illustrating the stories of the numerous windmills of the Fylde area. 

Second Floor

The practical aspects of grain milling. This floor features a major component of the original mill machinery, the great spur wheel, which drove the original millstones and all the ancillary equipment.

Also to be seen are our large scale models of the milling machinery, showing how millstones, now best known as garden ornaments, were actually used to produce the daily bread.

A separate model helps to explain how this apparently simple and cumbersome piece of stone is in fact a piece of precision engineering. Pictures are available on the Gallery page.

The upper floor

The cap machinery. Some of the most sophisticated machinery in any windmill is the mechanism which rotates the cap in order to keep the sails facing into the wind. Little Marton was quite a late, and hence advanced, example of this technology and we are particularly fortunate that our cap machinery survives largely intact.

It is also our good fortune that this machinery is clearly visible from the upper floor, enabling an understanding of how it worked. Images can be seen in the photo gallery.  

Some technical drawings.

Some of the drawings used to manage the 1986 renovations have survived.