April saw the Common’s Grade II listed ‘windmill’ being refurbished, after a long campaign by the MAC’s Charles Walton.
Technically a ‘wind pump’ or ‘smock mill’ it is the only listed building on the common. It was built in 1837 to pump water into an ornamental lake from the adjoining railway cutting. Before the filling of the lake in in 1884, which lost the wind pump its purpose, there were also four sails, long since gone.