West Kingsdown Windmill
Grade II listed windmill in West Kingsdown, Kent, England, UK

West Kingsdown Windmill is a Grade II listed smock mill in West Kingsdown, Kent, England, that was built in the early nineteenth century at Farningham and moved to West Kingsdown in 1880. It is the survivor of a pair of windmills.
History
Post mill
William Coles Finch stated that the post mill was originally built at Sevenoaks. However, the mill may have been built on site c.1804, when it was advertised for sale in the Kentish gazette of 25 September 1804.
In 1880, it was joined by the smock mill that was moved from Farningham and which survives today. The post mill was burnt down in May 1909 when a steam roller set fire to some straw near the mill and the fire then spread to the mill.
Smock mill
West Kingsdown Windmill was built in the early nineteenth century at Chimham's Farm, Farningham. It was marked on the 1819–20 Ordnance Survey map, Greenwoods map of 1821 and the Farningham Tithe Map of 1840. In 1880, it was moved to West Kingsdown, joining a post mill that was already there. The post mill burnt down in May 1909.
“West Kingsdown Windmill” enters the record as grade II listed windmill in West Kingsdown, Kent, England, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what West, Kingsdown and Windmill 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 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7985632. Authority coordinates are 51.337, 0.270. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1880, 1804, 1909 and 1819.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Kingsdown Windmill” 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.