Caddington Mill

Not much to see here now but 800 years ago you would have seen the windmill somewhere near here

The site of this windmill lies north of Dunstable Road, near the modern [March 2007] Garden Centre but to the north of the road. It was probably a timber post-mill and is an important archaeological site as it stood on a probable Bronze Age burial mound in which Roman funerary material was also found as well as evidence of later Anglo-Saxon burials.

The mill was noted as belonging to Caddington manor in a survey of 1299 [CRT130CAD8 and Bedfordshire Historical records Society volume I page 75]. Similar surveys in 1457 and 1649 do not mention the mill.

In volume XIV of the Bedfordshire Historical Records Society, published in 1931, J. Steele Elliott wrote thus: "Worthington G. Smith and the writer once visited together the large Saxon tumulus that stands in "Windmill Field" immediately to the S. of Bury Farm; this he claimed (rightly, I think) to have been the site of a windmill; he found fragments of Saxon pottery close to and upon this mound, and the antiquity of the structure is shown by the Dunstable road being cut right through the south side of it. The mound measures 72 feet across, and at present rises about 3 feet above the level of the field; the plough, cutting its furrows through it yearly, diminishes its elevation; but the contrast between the soil used for the mound and the surrounding soil is still very marked".

Mill Field Farm and Closes