00:01I'm here at the Avoncroft Museum and behind me is the magnificent Dansey Green Windmill.
00:08Zoe Willems is the director of the museum. Zoe, how did you come by this fabulous museum piece?
00:15Well this is an amazing windmill dating back to the 1820s. It was actually built nearby but not
00:23here at a place called Dansey Green which hence the name and it was probably a secondary mill to the
00:31water mill that was also there and it probably didn't sail for that long milling flour in its
00:37sight and then it gradually got more and more decrepit and bits fell off and so on and there
00:43was some amazing families back in the late 60s who actually came up with the plan to rescue the mill
00:52and move it here to to Avoncroft Museum so it was actually moved here in the late 60s early 70s
00:58and
00:58rebuilt and rebuilt as a working Midlands post mill. Oh yeah it's a fantastic theme. Graham Mackrow you're
01:07involved in preserving the museum and updating it. How much work is involved in doing that? As much as
01:13you're prepared to give it basically so I've been looking after the mill with a team for a couple
01:18years now. It hadn't sailed since 2019 until last summer because quite a list of tasks had sort of
01:24accrued over the years and we're working through that list. We can safely sail the mill now and we're
01:30very pleased to be able to start doing that last summer and we're sailing this year as well but there
01:35is always jobs to do and at the moment we're actually recoating the entire exterior of the windmill
01:40with a material called Stockholm tar which is a traditional natural waterproofing and preservative
01:46and as you can see it's quite a large structure so it takes quite a bit of time and effort.
01:50What's the most difficult part of preserving a beautiful mill like this? In terms of just
01:55preserving it as in in aspic just that keeping everything coated and protected from the elements
02:02in terms of operating it and sailing it just that ongoing mechanical wear and tear everything is
02:08held together with wedges and pegs and fairly hefty nuts and bolts there's nothing too refined about it
02:13so it's robust but it always needs adjustment. And it's really important to us at the museum that we
02:20have things as working examples not just sort of set in in aspic um so you know part of that
02:28is
02:28actually learning what it takes to keep a piece of machinery like this going you know the miller back
02:33in the day would have been constantly doing little repair jobs um and and so this team now has to
02:40learn
02:40how to do that to keep it in working order. This is absolutely magnificent a real working windmill being
02:47lovingly kept working by the people here at Avoncroft come down have a look and experience what it was
02:56like when bread was made the hard way.
