Gibraltar Mill, Great Bardfield
windmill in Great Bardfield, Essex, England, UK

Gibraltar Mill is a grade II listed Tower mill at Great Bardfield, Essex, England which has been converted to residential use.
History
The first date at which a windmill is definitely known to have been standing here is 1707. A date of 1680 is given by some sources, but no mill was marked on Ogilby and Morgan's map of 1678. It cannot be proved or disproved that a mill was standing here in 1680. The most likely date of erection of Gibraltar Mill is 1704. A possible scenario being an earlier mill having been blown down in the Great Storm of 1703 and the present mill replacing it. By 1754, the mill had been converted to a cottage. The mill was put back to work as a windmill by 1806, when it was insured for £300, having only been insured for £50 in 1800. The mill was worked in conjunction with the nearby Great Bardfield Watermill at various times. A new cast iron windshaft was fitted in 1877, replacing the former wooden one.
“Gibraltar Mill, Great Bardfield” enters the record as windmill in Great Bardfield, Essex, England, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gibraltar, Mill and Great can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5559174. Authority coordinates are 51.950, 0.443. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1707, 1680, 1678 and 1704.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gibraltar Mill, Great Bardfield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.