The Alford Windmill is a Lincolnshire type tower windmill — a style characterised by a slender, tapering brick tower with a movable cap that turns to face the wind. The cap here is white and onion-shaped, the classical ogee form, with a fan-stage supporting a large fantail that keeps the cap oriented correctly. The five patent-shutter sails catch the wind and drive the machinery inside.

Across seven floors, the mill's purpose was entirely practical. The ground floor holds the hurst frame and a fourth pair of millstones driven by an external gas engine — a backup for calm days. The spout floor receives the meal as it comes down from grinding. The stones floor houses the original three pairs: one grey pair cut from Peak District rock, two French quartzite pairs. Above that, two bin floors hold the grain before milling, with a sack hoist on the upper level. The dust floor at the top gives access to the inside of the cap. In its heyday, the mill could grind four to five tonnes of corn a day.

The windmill was purchased in the early twentieth century by Harry Hoyles, a local farmer and landowner. His sons Walter, Arthur, and Winston — known locally as 'The Miller' — ran the milling and baking operation together. For decades the mill was known as Hoyles's Mill, its flour going to local customers, its sails a familiar sight above the market town.

The business closed in 1955. Advances in large-scale industrial milling made the economics of windmill operation impossible to sustain, a pattern repeated across England in the mid-twentieth century as working mills became unviable one by one. The mill passed to Fred Banks of Kirton in Lindsey, a miller and owner of Mount Pleasant Mill, who recognised its significance and restored it to working order. Under his care, the mill shed its Hoyles name and became simply the Alford Windmill.

In 1978, Fred Banks had to replace the mill's cap and all five sails — a significant and expensive undertaking. That same year, ownership transferred to Lincolnshire County Council, which took on responsibility for the mill's ongoing restoration. The county had recognised what was at stake: of four windmills that had stood in Alford, only one remained, and if it fell into disrepair there would be nothing left of the town's milling heritage.

The council kept Fred Banks on as lessee until 1986, when he gave up his milling business. James Waterfield of Boston — himself the owner of the famous Maud Foster Windmill — took over the lease the following year. The mill then passed to Geoff Dees, and in January 2010 the current lease holder, Ian Shepherd, took over. The Lincolnshire County Council continues to hold ownership. The mill opens to visitors, its machinery operational, the smell of grain still present on grinding days.

The view from ground level is striking: five enormous white sails turning above a tapering black tower, the whole assembly moving with a mechanical grace that is easy to underestimate. Windmills look passive from the outside, but inside, the sound of grain grinding and machinery running fills every floor.

Alford's four mills once defined the town's skyline and its economy. Only this one remains, but it carries the weight of all of them. For a structure built to grind grain and not to last forever, the Alford Windmill has outlasted almost everything around it — the other mills, the generations of millers, the commercial logic that once made it indispensable. It turns because people decided it was worth keeping.