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SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES MARCH - DECEMBER 2008.
Village Plan Exhibition.
In March we took part in the Ullesthorpe Village Plan Exhibition: Past, Present and Future. Held in the Village Hall, it brought together stands on Archaeology, the Pre-School and Primary Schools, History of Ullesthorpe, Evergreens, Scouts, WI and many others beside that of the Windmill.
Attendance was good and our participation showed how we are now an integral part of the local community.
Open Weekends.
This summer we held 3 Open Weekends, in May, June and September. The June one coincided with Ullesthorpe Open Gardens Day, which draws a large number of extra people to the village to visit the many gardens open to the public.
We decided to limit the advertising placed in the local press (in which we also get good editorial coverage) to avoid drawing more than can currently be handled by the mill in its current state. Last year we were embarrassed by attracting 400 visitors in one day.
Due to the current floor loading limits, all visitors to the tower need to be accompanied by a guide, with no group exceeding 5 adults or children of a comparable weight. This is best achieved by having the same guide take his or her visitors up the mill one floor at a time, with all groups changing floors at about the same time. At least 4 guides (and preferably more) need to be available at a time and about twice this number during a day. Together with guides for the outside, a children’s corner and other members serving on the gate, in the shop and providing refreshment, around 15 members are involved every Open Day. We are able to achieve this but could not do so if we opened more frequently with these limitations.
Special attractions and events are laid on and this year were as diverse as an exhibition of windmill models (at each weekend), an exhibition of children’s drawings of the windmill, the 3D animated computer-aided design drawing currently being developed, Morris Dancing, a barbeque and an operating 19th century grain crusher.
The weekends drew an average of over 300 visitors each, the Sundays operating at around capacity. Approximately 75% are fee paying, the remaining being members, Friends and children. We keep an up-to-date survey of visitors and the results of this are provided elsewhere.
Typical open-day scene during 2008
Group Visits and Talks.
As well as the Open Weekends, the Trust receives visits from various special-interest groups. These usually take advantage of the long summer evenings and this year included U3A, Lutterworth Rotary Club, Peatling
Magna WI and Country Link.
During the winter months, members give talks to such groups. That to the Market Bosworth History Group has been already given and those to
Hinckley
Museum and the Broughton Astley Local History Society arranged.
Learning Activities.
One of the Trust’s priorities is to develop this aspect of its activities and our approach is covered in more detail elsewhere. On one day in November all four year-groups of
Ullesthorpe
Primary School visited the mill with their teachers and were guided around by members of the Trust. We have since received extremely positive feedback from the school and a visit by another primary school has been arranged.
Snibston
Discovery
Park exhibition.
As a member of Leicestershire and Rutland Museum Forum, the Trust participated in the Forum Exhibition 2008 with a display illustrating aspects of our current research and acquisitions. These included a mill map of Leicestershire and a selection of the iron weights and measures that were used in milling.
Poet in residence.
The Trust is taking part in this programme, which will run until March and is sponsored by Renaissance East Midlands and Leicestershire Heritage Services. The participating poet is Mark Goodwin. A recent meeting of the various stakeholders hosted by the Trust was most successful and resulted in a proposal to hold a minimum of 3 Creative Writing Workshops at the windmill.
A short film about windmlls.
The CCTV installation has proved very popular and the large-screen display provides us with the opportunity to also show short films. As none of the mill’s principal mechanisms operate and are unlikely to ever do so, we have commissioned a local film-making group to make a film showing the few surviving local windmills of various types and also how a windmill’s various mechanisms operate. The film, being made by a voluntary group, will cost us the group’s expenses and a donation, whilst they will retain copyright and show it to their own audiences, providing us with additional exposure.
Winter activities.
Each winter a programme of work is arranged, aiming at providing additional items of interest for next year’s visitors. The programme of work scheduled for this year has three strands:
1. Most of our visitors are family groups and couples and the interest of the mill lies primarily in its engineering. To balance this we have already commissioned a set of 19th century costumes for the miller and his family and we now intend to extend this to typical village clothes of the period. We have researched this and selected ladies, men’s and children’s outfits, which we are drawing and will have made up in time to display on manikins on different floors of the mill in time for our first Open Weekend of 2009.
2. In general there is little restoration work we can do ourselves until the full programme is implemented, largely due to the need for the floors to be renewed. This, though, does not affect the ground floor with its brick floor so we are cleaning and re-laying this, lime-washing the walls and cleaning the small grain millers and bruisers intended for cattle feed that John Goodacre has collected there – essentially small versions of mill stones within casing. The intention is to re-mount a shaft and pulleys that were used towards the end of the mill’s productive life and, using an electric motor, drive this equipment.
3. We have already acquired an iron-age rotary quern that is robust enough to be operated by children and which provides a good introduction to the principal of milling. One of our members will now lend us a Neolithic quern and we are arranging to borrow a Roman motarium and a medieval quern from
Leicestershire
Museum ’s reserve collection. Together these three will illustrate how little milling technology evolved over four thousand years until the invention of water and windmills in the first millennium AD.
Volunteers steam cleaning an old cattle feed milling machine.
Application for restoration and development funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Our long-term aim has always been to repair and restore the mil, opening it to schools and interested groups and to the public on one day a week in the summer. We would install a small museum, telling the mill’s story and that of milling, its millers and the community.
The only practical source of public funding for this is the Heritage Lottery Fund and in December last year we heard that the application process was soon to be reorganised, leading to a moratorium on applications whilst this took place. It seemed worth trying to get an application in before the March deadline as, even if unsuccessful, we would have learnt about the process and their priorities. The work that is required to prepare an application is considerable and, in the event, they decided that we were better suited to the revised two-stage process being introduced from September. There seemed to be things about the mill and our activities which they definitely liked but our chance of getting at least the funds to carry-out a number studies, to clearly define the aims and costs of the project, would be enhanced if we could submit a new application by around the end of the year.
So that is where we currently are – again struggling with a deadline whilst trying to do a hundred and one other things. It’s also where around 1,000 hours of effort have gone.
In conclusion.
So, as we look back on 2008, we can see that a lot has been done. This has been achieved by a team that came together in an exciting venture to add something of value, in terms of both enjoyment and learning, to our community. It is not a small task but it is proving a successful one.
Roger Jones
Project Manager
04.12.08.
MESSAGE FROM THE PROJECT MANAGER (adapted from the Autumn 2007 Newsletter)
Dear Friends,
Last time I wrote (spring 2007 newsletter) we were just running up to our first Open Day of the year, working to get everything ready in time and hoping that some people would actually turn up. We needn’t have worried. Despite pretty appalling weather, we had nearly 200 visitors over the May weekend, 400 on the June weekend and over 400 on a single day at the end of September. A great tribute to David Burton’s and Susan Tebby’s promotional efforts, which also resulted in considerable exposure in the local newspapers, but also a strong indication of the power of word-of-mouth and of the amount of curiosity we now have in our own roots. No longer is it just the great houses of aristocratic families that we visit.
Fortunately, we live in a county that is encouraging this trend and, somewhat to our surprise since we were entering for the first time, we collected a couple of County awards for museums run by volunteers, winning that for Best Event for our Spring Open Day and being Highly Commended in the category Inspiration Award for Best Special Project (see article below for more details).
Such success, even on our small scale, brings its problems. At our current stage, before serious restoration, loading on each floor is limited to 4 – 5 people. The route up will also always be the route down and the steps cannot be made any easier within the limited space. We must try to cater for both the very old and the very young. In particular, we never realised that the mill would be so attractive to children, some very young indeed.
This means that, over the winter, we will be looking again at how we organise visitors and increase their security. On our last Open Day we could reveal one step we have already completed: CCTV which allows visitors in the bake house to control steer-able cameras on the two highest floors, the stone floor and the cap, one of which also gives a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. This immediately showed that this will prove really useful to the less agile and to those made uneasy by the vertigo-inducing climb. We have Clive Barron to thank for engineering a system that improves significantly on the original spec.
Another innovation this summer has been our website (which you have obviously found already!). We are modestly proud of it and it is getting a high number of hits. Please let us have your comments, particularly if you would like to see any features added.
For the Trustees, there was quiet satisfaction in the Heritage Lottery Fund approving how we had spent the first half of our Defra grant and therefore releasing the rest. We now have some serious work to do preparing the restoration bid to the HLF. This will not be easy. Our experience over the last couple of years has taught us respect, not only for the builders of the windmill, the now lost skills that they employed and the tradition that they drew upon, but also for the hundred years of work of the millers and the visible scars of the 200 years of the mill’s existence. The evidence of all these is preserved in the mill, as it currently exists. We must therefore consider the material of the mill, the tradition and spirit of its design and how it operated. Rotten material must be replaced, but then we are not preserving the artefact. If we want to preserve the material, we can’t operate it. If it can’t be operated, how can we be true to the ethos of the designers, practical men who were building a machine?
These are not easy questions to answer but together we must find a solution that respects all of them as well as we can.
Roger Jones.
ULLESTHORPE WINDMILL WINS 2 AWARDS!
At an award ceremony sponsored by Leicestershire County Council and Renaissance East Midlands, Ullesthorpe Conservation Trust won the award for Best Event 2007 for Ullesthorpe Windmill’s May Open Days.
The competition was open to all volunteer-run museums in the county and this was the first opportunity that we had to enter.
The Trust was also Highly Commended in the “Inspiration Award for Best Special Project” category for our development work based on our Defra/HLF grant.
Our thanks to all who helped make this possible.
The judging panel, led by Mike Jones, Chairman of Leicestershire County Council, visit the Mill
Dr Susan Tebby and Roger Jones receive the award for Best Event on behalf of the Trust
OPEN DAYS
Our Open Days on 23rd and 24th June brought even more visitors – some 400 over the 2 days despite highly unfavourable weather. This is the maximum number we can cater for as we are careful to limit the numbers on each floor.
