A historic windmill in the English countryside that appeared alongside Dick Van Dyke and a magical flying car in the 1968 movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has gone up for sale.

The black-and-white Cobstone Mill, in Buckinghamshire, England, just outside London, is part of a property that also includes a main house, about 37 acres of land and a swimming pool. It could be yours for £9 million.

The mill is thought to have been built around 1816 and was used to grind cereal until 1873, according to Savills, the real estate firm selling the property. Before the windmill could be used as a movie location it needed substantial renovations. The property had been damaged by a fire and, according to local media reports at the time, squatters had been living in it.

In the film, which was loosely based on a children’s book by James Bond creator Ian Fleming, the windmill served as the home for Van Dyke’s character, a nutty, widowed inventor named Caractacus Potts, who lives with his children, Jeremy and Jemima. Together with his love interest, Truly Scrumptious, played by Sally Ann Howes, and his car, named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for its distinctive engine sounds, Potts made a journey to the land of Vulgaria to battle the tyrant Baron Bomburst.

But the windmill’s film industry connections didn’t end there.

In the early 1970s, actress Hayley Mills owned the property after her husband, Roy Boulting, a film director, bought it at auction for about $35,000, Mills said in a phone interview.

When she heard about the asking price, she said she “nearly fell off my chair”. Mills said she remembered visiting the property with her young son and having picnics on the hill, enjoying what she called one of the best views in England. “I thought it was a lot of money then,” she said.

In her 2021 memoir Forever Young, Mills wrote that she recognised the property immediately as the home in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

“It was love at first sight,” she wrote, envisioning herself and her husband watching their child play in the afternoon sun, even though the property was “utterly impractical.”

Mills never lived in the property, because her marriage ended before the renovations were completed, she said. In the end, the couple owned it for about a year.

New York Times News Service