That piece of metal poking up through the stones and debris in the wake of the flooded Wai-iti River just might be the 125-year-old windmill Stuart Langford has lost.
The relic was in pieces in a box when he purchased it two years ago and the Wai-iti engineer painstakingly put it back together and erected it about 12m from the river to pump water up the hill on his property near the base of the Wai-iti Valley.
That land it stood on is gone now and with it, the windmill, which he saw disappearing down the river after attempts to secure it failed.
“There were a few expletives given,” he admits.
So, he’s hoping that just maybe, someone spies it down the river or in the gravel the floods left behind. River stones now cover one of his flat paddocks to a depth of about 800mm and there’s plenty of similar paddocks down river where it might be lying – like numerous other items lost by landowners in the floods.
The windmill has a date stamp of September 1900, and Stuart says it started life with the Shuttleworth family on their farm, Wantwood, in Eighty Eight Valley.
“It’s the sort of thing that is irreplaceable, but I’m guessing it’s buried under gravel. To be fair, it will be a bloody mess, but even if we can get the main working bits back, we can probably repair it. It’s worth it for something that old.
“If it turns up, it would be lovely to get it back, whatever the condition.”
