The building wasn’t round inside after all. The walls varied so much in thickness that it was actually four-leafed-clover shaped and the smell was good, half healthy chickens and half grain, or could it be a flour smell? It was cool and dry and seemed to us altogether delightful. The former miller had used the walls to chalk up prices and quantities. There the writing still was! What could be more romantic to a couple of Londoners?

“When did it stop work?”

“Well, the top with the sails blew off in 1933, but they ground corn here using a donkey engine until 1939.”

Peter and I looked at each other, hardly daring to believe what we saw. It might be possible! What a room it would make!

“Can we look upstairs?”

Out of the door we went, carefully shutting in the hens to keep them off the Campbells’ garden; a quarter of the way round the mill, and there was a ladder.

“Its not very safe, I’m afraid. Be careful!”

At the top there was a low door under the eves, and inside a bell shaped room with a post up the middle. Under the roofing felt we could see tapering old tongue-and-groove planks, a circular ring of wood, and above that several heavy timbers at strange angles. The thickness of the walls downstairs in four places was here revealed as four solid brick buttresses finishing at different heights three-and-a-half to four feet above the wooden floor, which was strewn with broken glass, dust, and old picture frames.

“Be careful, the floor is rotten, I’m afraid,” said Bob, but we were enchanted.

Down the ladder again and round another quarter of the circumference we came to the chicken run, large and irregular in shape and half full of nettles and horseradish, dust, and bedraggled hens, and beyond were two empty pigsties and an enormous straggling rubbish heap, while towards the road was a very tall thin hedge, half hiding the little cottage we had passed on the way to the Campbells. To the east, away from the road, the semi-cultivated ground tapered off into a small field of about two and a half acres of sugar beet, and at the end finished in a deepish ditch, now dry, with a very large field beyond stretching all the way to the school. Lots of lovely unused land, we thought.
“We could have a garden?”