The 1612 map of the village shows that a windmill then stood by the road from the church to Weston Green. It was rebuilt around 1830 as a smock-mill and was working throughout the 19th century, owned by the Livermores and later by the Hall estate. The villagers would glean corn at harvest time and take it to the mill to be ground into flour. It stopped being a working mill shortly before the first world war.
Mill Terrace, the row of semi-detached red brick estate cottages opposite the windmill, was not on the 1881 census but was on that for 1891, which dates them to the mid to late 1880s. Each cottage was given apple and greengage trees.
Anthony Loates, evacuated from Sheffield in 1939 to his aunt Lil Challis at 32 Mill Terrace, says “Each village had an evacuation officer and Lil was Weston’s. All evacuees here ended up on Mill Hill because no-one else wanted them. Aunt Lil said ‘I’ll have Anthony,I don’t want none of that London lot’”. Another evacuee was Joyce Timcke at no.36.
Anthony stayed there until he was 17: “I studiedfor my ‘O’ levels by oil lamp.”
Most of the houses on either side of the old windmill have long gardens, but this is quite recent – the local farmer sold the land to the house owners in the 1990s. Before that time the houses had virtually no gardens at all, as can be seen from the aerial photo taken in 1988.
The Well
Weston Colville did not acquire piped fresh water until the late 1930s. Prior to that water was drawn from wells This one served some houses at Mill Terrace, although there was at least one other at 31 Mill Terrace and a spring at 29 Mill Terrace. The photo was probably taken in the late 1930s and shows Wilf Loates (born in Chapel Road in 1910) and his wife Dorothy. Lower Wood is in the background. The well was subsequently filled in with all sorts of rubbish including old brass lamps and was concreted over by Ellis Bailey.The concrete can still be seen a few metres from the road and track to Lower Wood. When the water became tainted, usually from horse manure leeching into the soil, pails would be hung on land drain pipes over the ditch on the opposite side of the road.
The piped water was accessed by “taps” situated at strategic points around the village. They were enclosed in a wooden box and each house was given a heavy brass key to turn them on. They invariably froze in a hard frost. The one at Mill Terrace was at the roadside where the garden gate to Farringford would be.
