Holgate Windmill

Yorkshire Post photographer, James Hardisty takes a  look behind the scenes of the working Holgate Windmill.

Transcript

00:00 Hi, I'm Chris Tippin, I'm a volunteer at Holgate Windmill. We're up in the cap now of the mill

00:12 and what you're looking at is the brake wheel here and this is the shaft which is attached

00:20 directly to the sails out there. When the brake comes off and the sails turn, that in

00:28 turn gets all this machinery down here spinning. The whole cap turns independently whenever

00:36 the wind changes so that the sails are always facing into the wind which is very important.

00:43 My name is Ulla Weiberg, I'm one of the milling volunteers here at Holgate and what I'm standing

00:58 in front of at the moment is one of our wind driven Derbyshire Peak millstones. You can

01:04 see it has some wooden furniture around it and a chute coming down from where the grain

01:10 is delivered to the top floor and above my head is a huge cog wheel that takes power

01:18 from the sails. This post here, called a quant, has some cog wheels and we can push that against

01:27 the grey spur wheel here in the centre and that way this will start turning round and

01:32 it will turn the millstones underneath it. This one and the one to my left, these are

01:38 wind powered ones and they have these quants going up to the cog wheel in the middle called

01:45 the grey spur wheel, whereas the one behind my left shoulder is electrically driven so

01:51 the shaft is going down through the floor to an electric motor. It's not connected to

01:57 the big spur wheel at all.

02:19 [sound of millstones falling]