"The oak trees: they stretch for miles and miles along the gently undulating country. They are not very high, and magnificence is not theirs, but they look immensely sturdy and their trunks are gnarled and twisted so that they give you an impression of violent effort.
"Then for miles, as far as the eye can see, you have the monotonous lines of furrows. Sometimes you pass a peasant ploughing his field with a wooden plough like those they used in Roman times, drawn by two mules. The wind blows cold and they are huddled in their brown blankets. They are spare old men with small sharp, pale eyes, and their earthy faces are thin and lined and astute; and the bitter cold of winter, the heat of summer, seems to have dried them up." Thus, writing in 1933, did William Somerset Maugham describe La Mancha. Al mansha is Arabic for "dry land" or "wilderness", and was the Moorish name given to the vast arid plain to the south of Madrid, between the Sierra Morena and the mountains of Toledo. The region's most renowned inhabitant was El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, whom we know and love as El Caballero de la Triste Figura - the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, Don Quixote. He was, if you remember, a man of gentle and amiable disposition, devoted to the ancient ways of chivalry, who roamed his native plain to seek adventure - and found it now and then by tilting at a windmill.
The earliest machines for grinding corn drew their motive power from a long horizontal beam which was pulled around and around in a circular path by animals, or even by a man himself. A later version of the same idea was the treadmill, driven by treading or walking on vanes or paddles to turn a horizontal shaft. In due course, water was substituted for foot-power with the development of the water mill; and the height of automation was reached many centuries BC when wind began to be used for this purpose.
Early windmills had no arrangement for turning the sails into the wind, and were simply built to face into what seemed to be the most advantageous direction. This disadvantage was overcome in later models by mounting the entire mill on a post on which it could rotate - a "post mill" - the orientation being carried out manually by means of a "tail-pole" fitted to the structure . Finally in the 14th century, the "tower mill" evolved: it had a fixed body - the tower, surmounted by a rotatable "cap" on to which the sails were fixed.