An island short on rivers but long on weather has to make use of what it has. The Isle of Man has plenty of weather. Most Manx mills were threshing mills - small towers on farms that separated grain from straw, doing in an hour what a flail and a strong back took a day to do. A handful were corn mills proper, grinding flour for the local trade. Most belonged to a single farm, not to a community, which is why so many of them vanished without a fuss when the farm changed hands or the threshing machines came in by sea. There were never grand industrial cathedrals here, the way there were in East Anglia or the Low Countries. There were small, useful towers that did one job for a small number of people.

Of all the Manx mills, the one at Ballacorage, Ballaugh, had the strangest second life. Built as a threshing mill in 1878, it sounds straightforward enough - though the records are confusing, since the same source notes that it was destroyed by fire on 6 January 1850, decades before it was reputedly built. Whatever the dates, by 1874 it was a ruin. Then in 1951 it found an unexpected new tenant. The Witches Mill, as it came to be called, opened as a museum of witchcraft and ran until 1973, drawing curious visitors to a quiet corner of the northern plain. After the museum closed the tower stood empty again until the 1990s, when somebody converted it into a house and built a glass roof inside the brickwork. A grain-mill, a curiosity museum, a home - all in the same modest tower.

The tower mill at Ramsey - Lezayre Mill, on the road into town - was the most ambitious of them all. John Monk built it as a combined corn and saw mill, finishing it on 29 August 1836. The tower stood 64 feet high on a base 35 feet in diameter, six storeys of brick rising above the northern coast. Within a generation it was clear that wind alone would not keep the work flowing, so in 1862 the owners added a steam engine for auxiliary power. By the end of the 1870s the wind side of the operation had probably given up altogether. The tower stayed standing through the next century - until the 1960s, when somebody cut it down to two storeys and turned it into a house. The drum of brickwork is still there for anyone who knows where to look.

The list of vanished mills carries the small, strange details that catalogues alone preserve. At Bootleyvelt in Maughold, the mill was apparently built in a tall tree and used for chopping gorse - a job nobody else's mill records mention. At Billown Quarry in Malew, a large iron windpump kept the workings dry. At Michael, a five-sailed mill is said to have burnt down in 1865 and been replaced by a four-sailed one. At Ballaquane near Peel, a mill recorded in 1608 was gone by 1648, then another rose in 1841 only to burn down on 17 December 1847. Fire takes a remarkable number of these towers. Wood, grain dust, and friction make a combination that needs only one bad afternoon to settle. The mill at Ballamoar in Jurby surfaces only in the will of Captain Thomas Christian, written in 1725, and never again.

Walk the back lanes of Andreas or Ballaugh or Maughold now and you will not see a windmill. You will see a few odd round stone walls along a hedgerow, a low brick stump in a field, perhaps a converted house with thicker walls than its neighbours. The Isle of Man's mills were never numerous and they were never famous, but their disappearance maps the slow industrialisation of Manx farming - threshing by steam, then by tractor, with grain shipped in for the same money it cost to grow it. Cataloguing what is gone is its own quiet kind of preservation. The names are still there: Mullen Guiye, Ballakermeen, the Witches Mill, Lezayre. Read them aloud and the towers stand up again for a moment, sails turning.