Lode Mill, Anglesey Abbey

Lode Mill, part of the Anglesey Abbey estate north of Cambridge, now owned and managed by the National Trust, is one of England’s best-reserved water corn mills. Anglesey Abbey is a Jacobean house containing many works of art collected by Huttlestone Broughton, first Baron Fairhaven (1896-1966) who bought the estate in 1926 and passed it to the National Trust on his death. The mill was used in the late nineteenth century for processing coprolite and subsequently for grinding clinker to make cement. The latter process has given a grey sheen to most of the interior woodwork. In 1934 Baron Fairhaven purchased the mill and added it to the Anglesey Abbey estate, and subsequently restored it to working order as a corn mill. It could no longer be worked when the National Trust took over the estate in 1966, but in 1978 the Trust with the Cambridgeshire Wind and Water Mill Society, began to restore the building and the equipment, and by 1992 it was again producing flour. The mill is conventional arrangement with a wide undershot wheel driving stones through a pit wheel, a wallower, a vertical shaft and a spur wheel. On the top floor is a hoist for raising sacks of grain that can be fed to the stones. The mill produces both wheat and oat flour that is sold in the mill shop.