From the Secretary
As I type this we have just finished the final Open Day of the year, and I thought it would be useful to look back over events during that time..
The long awaited sails were replaced by Vincent Pargeter on the 29th of July, a week earlier than we had been expecting. We had a good crowd of onlookers, many with cameras, together with a camera crew from ITV who had pride of place in the middle of the field. Their pictures edited down to about 3 minutes were shown three times during their Breakfast programme the next day. Several visitors for Open Days following that, gave seeing the Mill on TV as the reason for their visit. Our thanks to Richard Dodds for his expert publicity for this event.
It was quite a blustery day with an amazing array of changing clouds behind the Mill. From the collection of photographs I took the sky ranges from almost black cloud through white cloud to blue sky. There was also an option of with and without sunshine! If you missed the event there are pictures on the next page.
Unfortunately Vincent has had urgent work to do on other mills, and the weather is holding up most of this work, so fitting the striking rod, spider, shutters and other fittings to the new sails is having to wait until he is free. The weather has also been holding up Paul’s work of painting the old sail frames, but our Tuesday working party have remade broken shutters and other parts of the sails and prepared and painted them with three coats of Linseed paint. We hope we will be able to refit the old sails about the same time as Vincent completes the new ones.
Our Open Days have gone well, despite the the very wet weather at the start of the season. As I type this after the last Open Day of the year I see from my records that during the past season we have had over 2,000 visitors. (That covers regular weekend Open Days, and special openings during the week for Guides, Brownies Cub packs and other organisations.) I must give a big thank you to our faithful few, the Guides and Stewards who made this possible, and to Brian Hayden who looks after our sales items.
Before the first Open Day in April next year we urgently need a few more guides to show our visitors over the Mill. It is not a difficult job and Neil has written a basic script that you can alter to suit yourself. We are open on the first and third weekends of the month from April to October. Even one attendance a month would make everyone’s life a lot easier. If you are interested please contact me. My details are on the inside of the front cover. - John Winn