50 C O N T E X T 1 3 0 : J U LY 2 0 1 3 Book reviews Sailing through Brill Windmill, Buckinghamshire: the history, technology, conservation and repair of a 17th-century post mill Luke Bonwick, with Martin Bridge, 100pp, 107 illustrations, Buckinghamshire County Council, 2010, available for £12 plus £3.50 p&p from the Mills Archive bookshop at http://shop.millsarchivetrust.org/ Books (as opposed to booklets) on individual mills are few and far between. Although a brief guide might have broad appeal as a souvenir, the audience for a more extended monograph is small, and the end result when it is attempted may be little more than a volume of self-congratulation on completion of a ‘restoration’ project, with lots of photographs of happy volunteers working away, but little or no analysis of a mill’s history and development up to the point when the restorers moved in. This is a pity, as careful study of one existing mill may teach us much about others now lost. The opportunity offered by the recent programme of conservation work at Brill Windmill has produced this excellent study, which should be a model of research and record-keeping for any similar project, even if the end results are not intended for publication. Brill is a well-known post mill, one of a number which were ‘rescued’ in the inter-war years, primarily on the basis of one 17th-century date carved on a timber – there was a sort of competition going on between enthusiasts at the time to find (and save) the oldest surviving windmill in England. Some of this enthusiasm was a bit misdirected, and certainly it was a pity that (apparent) age, rather than the more-difficult-to-quantify ‘interest’ of a mill has often dogged their protection in the subsequent 80 years. However, Brill having been preserved, after a fashion, it remains today as one of the few survivors of many Chilterns/south midlands post mills. As such is an instructive historic document, which Luke Bonwick and the dendrochronologist Martin Bridge here read for us with great clarity. There is a good historical introduction, with excellent photographs from the Mills Archive and elsewhere, which sets Brill in the context of other post mills in the area (which included two others almost on the same site), followed by a thorough description and analysis of the structure and working parts. This is accompanied by a magnificent series of measured drawings of every aspect of the structure, framing and machinery, and a full account of recent repairs. The book’s subtitle talks of conservation and repair, not restoration. The work which has been carried out, while returning the mill more closely to its last working appearance and undoing some poorly-considered 20th-century interventions, has not attempted to create a working mill. The reasons for this decision are explained and could be applicable to serious works to any historic building. Although it has waned in recent years, there is still too much enthusiasm for getting a mill to work, often at the expense of much that is genuine, with the result that we have a new mill, pretty to look at, but without any real interest or value. Brill is lucky to have escaped with only a non-original handrail to the steps, which might perhaps have been designed so that it could be installed only when access was needed on open days, rather than presenting a permanent inauthentic feature. I come back to the misdirected enthusiasm of those 1930s mill-lovers and their beloved 17th-century dates. There is a date (?68?) carved on one timber at Brill, but is it the date of the mill? For Stanley Freese and others it was good enough (Freese’s account of restoration work at Brill
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