Qualla: Black Mill, Waxholme

Black Mill, Waxholme: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ProfessorPugwash, CC BY 4.0. In 1917, an army signals officer named J.R.R. Tolkien was stationed in East Yorkshire, recovering from trench fever after the Somme. His wife Edith came to stay nearby. One afternoon she danced for him in a hemlock glade near the village of Roos, and he wrote about it for the rest of his life: she became Luthien Tinuviel, the elven princess, and he became Beren the mortal who loved her. Less famously, when he stood on Thirtle Bridge a few miles further south, he could see two towers on the flat Holderness horizon: the Withernsea lighthouse to the east and, halfway between, the dark truncated stump of an old windmill at Waxholme. Some readers of Tolkien have wondered ever since whether these were the original Two Towers.

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Image: ProfessorPugwash | CC BY 4.0

Black Mill, Waxholme: Half a Mill Standing

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Black Mill is also called Owthorne Mill, after a vanished village along this stretch of the eroding Holderness coast. A tower windmill has stood on this site since at least 1648. The last record of it working as a mill is around 1900, after which it became a landmark rather than ...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Black Mill, Waxholme: The View From Thirtle Bridge

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Horncastle, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk from Roos to the coast along the country roads here and you reach Thirtle Bridge, a quiet crossing that gives onto a sweep of flat farmland leading to the sea. Less than two miles away, the white tower of Withernsea lighthouse rises 127 feet against the sky, slim and pale an...

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Image: Stephen Horncastle | CC BY-SA 2.0

Black Mill, Waxholme: A Landscape That Made a World

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith D at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tolkien spent only months in East Yorkshire. He never wrote explicitly about Holderness in his Middle-earth books. The argument that Black Mill and Withernsea lighthouse inspired the Two Towers will always be a matter of literary speculation rather than proof. But the Holderness ...

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Image: Keith D at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0