Tenants of the bright new houses which have literally sprung up in the past few months in the fields at Orchard Head Lane, Pontefract, and which were described and pictured in the ‘Express’ last week, have no doubt cast more than one glance at a home of a very different kind, made in the old windmill on the other side of the lane.

Standing foursquare on its hill, the mill has shouldered sturdily the storms and gales of passing years, which have buffeted it from all round the compass; and it still carries the wounds of some of them - for twice it has been struck by lightning. Its old roughcast plaster is grey with decades of weathering.

But it has made a comfortable home. Mr. and Mrs. R. Stephens have lived there since 1939 and Mrs. Stephens, who is a country women, has developed a strong affection for the old place, and it has its attraction. A wide view of Pontefract is obtained from a window of the surprisingly spacious ground-floor living room, and the circular shape of the room provides its own novelty. The curving walls allow the furniture to be set well back and give free passage; and the bedroom stairs wind up the wall with an air of their own, and make little difference to the roominess. Mrs. Stephens likes the wide views from the windswept home, but does not begrudge their own homes to the hundreds of people coming on the new estate which has hemmed in the mill on the east. As she points out, the houses are needed. In fact, she benefits in one way as the biting "north-easterlies" no longer strike so hard.