Qualla: Parys Mountain Windmill

Parys Mountain Windmill: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iain Macaulay, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most tower windmills have four sails. Parys Mountain Windmill had five. That is its first oddity. The second is that this mill, built in 1878 on the highest point of Parys Mountain near Amlwch, was the last tower windmill ever built in Wales - the final flowering of a technology that the steam engine had been making obsolete for a hundred years. The third oddity is its purpose. It was not built to grind grain. It was built to pump water out of a copper mine. By the 1870s the shafts at Parys had been sunk so deep into the orange-stained mountain that water was filling them faster than the existing steam engines could lift it. The owners decided to add wind to the equation - free power if you could harvest it, free coal saved if you could harness it. So they raised a stone tower mill at the summit, 138 metres above sea level, with five sails because more sails caught more wind.

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Image: Iain Macaulay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Parys Mountain Windmill: The Mountain Underneath

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve F, CC BY-SA 2.0. Parys Mountain has been mined for copper for several centuries; the Romans worked the outcrops here, and small-scale extraction continued through the medieval period. The big strike came in 1768, when a substantial seam of copper ore was discovered close to the surface. Within a ...

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Image: Steve F | CC BY-SA 2.0

Parys Mountain Windmill: Five Sails and a Cellar

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Croker, CC BY-SA 2.0. The windmill was built specifically as a pumping engine. Its sails turned a shaft that drove the pump rods reaching deep into the mine workings below. It also lifted ore to the surface and lowered machinery into the shafts. A 1975 survey by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and...

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Image: Dave Croker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Parys Mountain Windmill: Decline

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Parys mine had been losing the global copper price war since the 1840s, as cheaper ore came in from Chile and the United States. By the 1880s the operation was uneconomic at scale; only specialist demand and the recovery of by-products kept it open at all. Production wound do...

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Parys Mountain Windmill: Why the Hill Looks This Way

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur C Harris, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the windmill on a clear day, the orange and ochre spoil heaps of Parys Mountain spread away to the east, the harbour at Amlwch sits two miles north on the coast, and the Irish Sea opens to the north-east. The whole mountain is now part of the GeoMon UNESCO Global Geopark, re...

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Image: Arthur C Harris | CC BY-SA 2.0