A run through of archives : A - E 🌍

EnrichUK.net is a searchable portal linking 150 websites that have been supported with Lottery good causes money distributed by the New Opportunities Fund. Many of them provide access to archives of historical photos and other historical records.

Working through the sites in alphabetical order has given quite a few mill references.

• Art and Architecture has a surprisingly poor set of just 18 results for windmill, though the Overturned windmill on Barnes Common after a storm is very interesting
• Am Baile has images from the Inverness area, which contains just one windmill image, that of Old windmill at South Kessock, Inverness
• Cotton Town covers Blackburn and Darwen and their place in the UK textile industry. Not surprisingly it has thousands of items returned when you search on mill, but a search on windmill gives a more modest 15 entries - including 2 prints of the windmill at Eanam, Blackburn. Unfortunately linking to individual results seems not to work.
• Digital Library of Historical Directories has searchable scans of a good set of historical trade directories. A search for windmill turns up almost 500 entries - thats a massive resource indeed (even if some of those do turn out to be just an address in Windmill Road).
• Etched on Devon's Memory includes topographical prints of Devon 1660-1870. It has a specific thematic guide page devoted to mills.
• Fen Past covering the Cambridgeshire Fens is a bit of a disappointment, since its difficult and confusing to navigate. My initial search for windmill, entered in the search box on the home page returned just one page that happened to mention the word. Searching images is done separately - reached via the image search link. However, a promising 150+ results turned out to be supplied by just 3 documents - notably an accounts book whose many pages all carried the same caption which included the word, so nothing of relevance there. Finally, I found that there was a windmills category supported by the image search, which fetches relevant images - though a rather small set of just 9 images.