WEST PROSPECT OF NEW ROMNEY MILL, ERECTED IN 1795.

Water-colour map with a central and large prospect of a windmill, 11½ × 7 inches (30 × 17 cm).


A windmill at New Romney was recorded first in 1500 when it was described as 'falling to pieces'. Presumably its successor is shown north-east on the 1596 map. It is not unlikely that it had to be replaced 200 years later, by the structure depicted here in this water-colour map. This smock mill worked three pairs of stones and was at one time used by a miller named Ashby. In 1878 Stonham & Son were millers here. It was still working in 1894, when repairs were executed. (Finch).

By 1933, when Finch conducted his survey, the mill was no longer extant. Mills became rare in the both Romney and Walland Marsh areas as the the land was converted from arable to pasture for sheep. Once well populated by the seventeenth century, the area became sparsely tenanted and with little land under cultivation for wheat, the main 'food' of windmills.

The water-colour shows a typical Kent Smock Mill, not unlike that surviving mill at Cranbrook, however, the mill portrayed has a single story brick ground floor and a surrounding stage supported by ground columns and a wooden slatted superstructure. The fantail and the sweeps are not present (yet), which may indicate that the water-colour shows the windmill before these were constructed. The map below shows the mill house and the adjacent cottages and infields close by.

See Finch, W. Coles Watermills amd Windmills, 1933 p. 267.