grockwood wrote:KOF I used your info and Googled the stellingmolen type of windmill. After readinfg several websites I get the impression that the stellingmolen is a grain grinding windtmill and the polder is used for water draining. Not so much a reginal type. Unless the Arnhem region doesn't have any canals or lands reclaimed from the sea, the stellingmolen might be found there. The Windmill I bought at Walmart has a few features from both but for the most part is a polder windmill. I plan to do some work on it such as add a larger walk way around it and somehow enlarge the doorway a little. The doorway currently scales out to a scale 5ft 3 in. tall opening. Once modified,I think it will look ok in a Market Garden dio.
Can't say for sure. I'm no windmill expert, but I've visited a few, and, from what I gather, Dutch windmills can be classified depending on their type and function.
Now, I’d say most polder windmills are used to pump water out of the polders and most polders were traditionally located in the provinces of North/South Holland (nowadays, also in Flevoland, perhaps, which is basically a huge polder reclaimed from the Zuider Zee).
This means polder windmills have some features that are typical of this area. Conversely, you will hardly find many of these ‘polder windmills’ in other regions of the Netherlands where there are few, if any, polders.
According to <a href="
http://www.mychoices.net/html/dutch_mills.html">this page</a>, polder windmills can be broadly divided into two types: the <I>buitenkruier</I> (in South Holland) and the <I>binnekruier</I> (in North Holland).
These windmills are quite similar and usually have an octogonal ground floor with wooden walls, sometimes with brickwork instead of wood, and a large thatched superstructure (which is several stories high) crowned by a rotating cap; the main difference being the way the cap and the sails are rotated (cf. <I>buitenkruier</I> vs <I>binnekruier</I>).
In my limited experience, this is what Dutch “polder windmills” look like. However, the fact that they are called “<b><i>polder</i> windmills</b>" only means this type of windmill is most frequently found on polders, but they can be found elsewhere.
On the other hand, the distinctive feature of a <I>stellingmolen</I> is the outer <I>stelling</I>, which is a wooden walkway immediately below the thatched superstructure rising several stories above ground level. This is an important difference: the sails of the stellingmolen are higher than the sails of a poldermolen (that’s why the walkway is necessary), because the wind blows freely through the polder, whereas it doesn’t through a wooded area for instance. When the sails can be reached from the ground, the windmill is called a <I>grondzeiler</I>. A stellingmolen will never, ever, be a grondzeiler.
You can search the following Dutch windmill database for the province of Gelderland (Gelders), so you can get a clearer picture of the windmills in the Arnhem area (results are in Dutch only):
http://www.molendatabase.nl/nederland/k ... Gelderland
You should expect to find more windmills of the stelling type than the polder type in the Arnhem area (though I've spotted at least one of the latter type, a grondzeiler).
