Building record DRK 004 - Drinkstone Post Mill

Post Mill. Shown on Ogilby's map, 1675 (S3).
Timber framed with two cloth covered and two shuttered sails. Dates from 1685. Working order (S1). Disused in early 1970's. Two common and two spring sails, two pairs of stones, an oat crusher, two saws and a sewing machine for sacks, all driven by wind. The mill had a tailpole until the 1950's when a fantail was added, using parts from Woolpit and Stradbroke mills (S2). The buck (Suffolk for body) has an unusual framing which alone dates her to C17.
Dates from 1586-7 (S4)(S5).
Recorded in gazetteer of significant Industrial Archaeological sites extracted from a 1980 booklet entitled 'Industrial Archaeology in and around Norfolk' and revised as 'Suffolk IA Sites in 1980' in Suffolk Industrial Archaeological Society Newsletter in 2011 where it is described as:
John Jones:
Visited & Photographed May 1999
2012 - Belived to be on the Buildings at Risk Register.
Bob Malster:
TL/964622 Post windmill listed as grade 1 since dendrochronology revealed that the main post on which the mill turns had been felled in 1587, and that other timbers in the structure of the buck or body of the mill were of much the sames age or in some cases even older. It is possible that millwrights were working on the mill when news came of the defeat of the Armada. The mill had been updated many times in its life, in the 20th century being fitted with a fantail aquired by the Clovers from a demolished mill. It had one pair of cloth-coloured sails and one pair of spring sails, but these were removed when they became unsafe. Restoration began sometime ago but has since stalled. On the same site is a smock mill, converted from a former horse mill and latterly driven by an oil engine, which survives in running order in an adjacent shed. The mills were worked by several generations of the clover family, the last of whom, Wilfred Clover, continued to use the post mill for grinding corn right upto the 1970s. The age of the post mill and the presence of a second mill makes this site of significant importance. Visible from Woolpit, Beyton road.

This is the only windmill in the country to contain Tudor fabric in its original context (S7)

2006: The dendrochronology and historic analysis of 2002 identified three exceptionally early 'phases of construction' in Drinkstone Mill, i.e. Phase One, 1543-74 (the 'bray posts' and, on the basis of their similar chamfers, the re-used studs, mid-rails of the buck); Phase Two, 1587 (the mill post, quarter bars and possibly the crown tree); and Phase Three, bearing the carved date 1689 (the intact core of the present buck, recycling elements of Phase One.)
The work of 2005 has confirmed this analysis, but has revealed more evidence of the framing pattern in the Phase One buck. The previous suspicion that the four corner posts had been re-used from a fourth phase of construction has also been confirmed, and this report inlcudes a suggested reconstruction of the frame for hich these parts were designed. A second attempt to date this frame by dendrochronology unfortunatley failed, but it probably represents a mill buck of the 14th or 15th centuries and is therefore the earliest known example of its kind (S8) (S9).