Sack Lift and Hatch @museum.de

M: The hatches and openings in the floor aren't for the faint-hearted! But they're essential for the mill to operate smoothly from top to bottom. The large shafts, cogwheels and gears transmit the wind energy from the cap, that is, from the top of the mill, all the way down to the lowest level.

F: On the other hand, any grain delivered to the mill first had to be hoisted up to the level with the milling gear. That's what the sack lift is for – and of course it's also powered by wind energy. The miller would attach a full sack to a chain, which in turn was attached to a rope. A wind powered winch was used to hoist the heavy sack up to the grinding floor. The sack was hauled through the horizontal trap doors, which closed as soon as it had passed through – to make sure the miller didn't have a nasty fall.

M: Once it had been milled on the floor above us, the meal or flour would trickle back down here and through the chute into the waiting sacks, which were then brought back down using the sack lift. Wherever you looked, machinery was rotating and rattling and crunching. And often enough, a section of timber would catch fire due to the frictional heat. To make sure there was always water to hand to put it out, a tub containing several hundred litres of water stood here on the first floor.

F: An accident or a mill fire was seen as a bad omen. If a mill burnt down, it usually only took a year to rebuild it. But quite often, it would be rebuilt on a different site – better safe than sorry. As we mentioned earlier, our mill moved several times over the 200 years of its existence, and some of those moves can probably be put down to precautionary measures based on popular superstition.