Thorpeness Windmill
12A Uplands Rd, Thorpeness, IP16 4NQ
Website MapOriginally located in the nearby village of Aldringham, Thorpeness Postmill has been recently renovated. It is privately owned, but has open days to welcome visitors to learn of its rich history and how and why it came to be located next to the famous ‘House in the Clouds’, sitting above Thorpeness Meare.
Built in 1802 as a corn mill, Thorpeness Windmill originally stood in Aldringham, behind the village’s famous smugglers’ inn, The Parrot & Punchbowl, which still exists today.
By the 1890s, it – like a significant swathe of the Suffolk Coast around then then little fishing community of Sizewell – was in the ownership of the Ogilvie family.
Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie who had conceived the idea of making a ‘Merrie Olde England’-style leisure village out of the hamlet and wetlands of Thorpe, had the windmill dismantled in 1922/3 and re-erected it on the heath by Thorpeness Meare.
Its new purpose was to pump water to feed the adjacent water tower (House in the Clouds). The mill was wind-driven until 1940.
