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Page 2

Newsletter 137 Summer 2022   © Hampshire Mills Group

 

 

The Windmills of Sweden

 

 

Report by Ruth Andrews of a talk given by Peter Hill to HMG's spring meeting

Photos by Peter Hill

 

When the first Covid lockdown occurred 2 years ago Peter Hill had been preparing a talk for us entitled The Windmills of Sweden.  He was finally able to present it in person on Saturday 12 March 2022, thereby becoming our first live speaker for quite a while.  After the talk, Peter Hill very kindly lent me his notes;  Peter’s pictures were all in the form of slides, so I couldn’t get digital versions for this report.  He lent us a few photos, whilst Keith and I hastily photographed other photos from his albums, so some of the photos that you see below are of poor quality.

Peter’s talk was based on the TIMS (The International Molinological Society) tour to Sweden and Finland in 1995.  They visited 78 windmills and 6 watermills, starting in Stockholm and visiting the Finnish islands of Åland and Enklinge for 3 days and the Swedish island of Gotland for a further 3 days.

 

The visits started at Skansen, the open-air buildings museum in Stockholm, which has 3 preserved mills.  They include this hollow post mill (far left), where the upright shaft passes through the main post.

Also in the Stockholm area the group visited several more mills including a large post mill at Lidingö (right), where the access steps are built on top of the tail pole. 

 

 

On Åland the group visited the Jan Karlsgården open-air museum, which has several mills including 3 windmills on a ridge, two with very long tail poles, and a small watermill with a horizontal Norse-type wheel and a thatched roof (right).

 

 

 

On the smaller island of Enklinge, with 8 mills in various states of dereliction, was this sunken post mill (left), with the post firmly fixed in a huge granite outcrop.

In Gotland, another open-air museum at Bunge had several windmills including this 6-sailed triangular sawmill (below left), where the whole body of the mill rotated at ground level, and a beautiful 8-sided windmill built in log-cabin style with overlapping corner joints (below right), a rare example built in 1794 and of a design only found in southern Gotland.

 

 

At Slite the 3-story stone tower mill has a shingled roof and a braced tailpole.

 

 

Also on Gotland was Havdhems Kvarn, a giant smock mill now incorporated into a large working industrial milling complex.

 

The following examples illustrate some of the many different types of mills visited. There are early sunken post mills, open trestles, hollow post mills, smock mills, paltrok mills, and tower mills. Some have 4 sails (the Swedes call them ‘wings’), some 6.  None use shutters or cloth sails, the sail frame is covered with wooden boards. Most use tail poles for turning into the wind, the group only saw one fantail. Practically all the mills had single step gearing with the cogs of the brake wheel meshing with the staves of a lantern pinion wallower turning the upright shaft to power a single pair of stones.

Thank you, Peter, for an excellent talk.

 

Botsarve

Väsby

 

Disabarden, a paltrok mill

 

Sandvic, a sunken post mill

Gullarve

   
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