Tag Archives: industrial archaeology

Architecture, Country Walks Without a Car, History, Walking

Skipton Castle and Woods

July 22, 2021 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

A lovely, warm, sunshiney weekend everyone said, so off we went like the magical, spontaneous creatures we are. Minimal extras, as the spontaneous non-car life demands (but more about that later). A quick search of places not too far, well suited for country walks, with a train station and a reasonable room for two nights. Not the easiest of combinations to find, but Skipton was brilliant.

The land orginally belonged to Earl Edwin, son of Leofwine and brother to Leofric of Mercia according to an 1873 history of Skipton. This is mostly a rather boring account about lords and ladies, has some interesting lists of goods and lands taxed and the meaning of wealth. But I love this description of the castle’s founding:

After the forfeiture of Earl Edwin, the first grantee of his lands in Craven was Robert. de Romille, a Norman adventurer of ancient family. In his choice of a situation for the seat of his barony, Romille had nothing but the face of Nature to direct him. There had, unquestionably, been a Saxon manse at Bolton, for the occasional residence of the lord; but it was now dilapidated; and though the sequestration of that favoured place would have attracted a monk, and its beauties a man of taste, yet it wanted two of the first ingredients in the residence of an ancient baron—elevation and natural strength. These Romille found. on the brink of a perpendicular rock at Skipton, which furnished an impregnable barrier to the north; while a moderate declivity to the south, equally rocky, and therefore incapable of being undermined, afforded sufficient room for the enclosure of a spacious “bailley,” the ramparts of which would command the plain beneath.
The erection of this castle elevated the place at once from a poor dependent village to a respectable town. In times of turbulence and disorder, the inhabitants of the adjoining country would crowd for protection under its walls. Many privileges also would be granted by the lords, many advantageous offices enjoyed by their immediate dependents…
— An extract from the History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County of York by Thomas Dunham Whitaker, 3rd Edition Published in 1878

Skipton Castle is splendid, increasingly well-fortified over the years to defend against incursions by the Scots by the Clifford family, whose principal family seat it served until 1676. Of Lady Margaret Russell (1560-1616), who married George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland in 1577, the website states: ‘deeply interested in alchemy she discovered many excellent medicines‘. Looking her up I didn’t find much more about that, but she was also the patron of Emilia Lanier, first woman to style herself a professional poet (and possibly Shakespeare’s dark lady). She enjoyed being a mistress more than a wife. I would know more of them. Lady Russell’s daughter Anne is most celebrated in the placards around the castle itself, and planted the lovely old yew that stands in the castle courtyard in 1659. They grow so slowly.

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City Unseen, Country Walks Without a Car, Walking

Rochdale to Healey Dell and the Cotton Famine Road

July 6, 2020 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

We started in Rochdale — I like Rochdale a great deal though austerity feels like a knife here. It has cut so deep, you can see the pain of it. But this was the best walk we’ve done in a long time, up from the tram station to Healey Dell which is an extraordinarily beautiful place.

Of course to get to it, you have to pass a ruined asbestos factory left to sit here empty, enormous, poisonous.

You are warned by signs that this land is still not entirely safe, even where it seems to have returned to the wild.

But then you come to the nature reserve proper, walk along the old railway line and to the beautiful viaduct over the Spodden.

At its base sits Th’Owd Mill I’Thrutch, a fulling mill built in 1676 by the Chadwick family to process woolen cloth until the late 19th Century. Signs tell you:

Originally the cloth was soaked in a concoction of water. stale urine, soapwort, and Fullers Earth. Workers pounded it by foot; just like treading grapes. In 1863 the process became mechanised using steam power, when a boiler house and chimney were built.

There is very little left of it.

You remember once again that this period of industrialisation was not urban. It scattered along rivers like these, a network now of evocative and beautiful ruins along the river banks of the north in places like Lumsdale Valley, Cromford and New Mills. The waterfalls here are splendid things, and the boundaries in this nature preserve are confused between the natural flow of water and that channeled to service the early industrial revolution before the advent of steam. Steam changed everything, lies beneath the short and desperate lives of workers, the terrifying urbanisation of cities like Manchester.

You continue up the Spodden, then walk down a narrow stairway, ears full of water’s crashing to stand looking out upon this and the stones witness to water’s own force for moulding and shaping the world as it passes.

Even here we could not escape Covid-19, the conspiracy theories that swirl around it. COVID-19 PLANNED BY GOVERNMENT written across all the bins…as if we had a government that could plan anything at all.

From here we climbed up to Rooley Moor to meet the Cotton Famine Road. A cobbled road built across the moors by unemployed cotton workers, who sided with the abolitionist cause during the American Civil War. In solidarity with slaves, while also creating employment for themselves, they successfully campaigned for the passage of the 1863 Public Works Act.

I wanted more moors, more space, more air to breathe before going home, but it was getting late and the miles piling up. So instead of following this yellow brick road we headed back down to Healey Dell, back down into Rochdale. Home.

City & Country, Country Walks Without a Car

Cotton Mills: New Mills to Chinley

February 28, 2018 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

Weekend walk — in the sun but god, have these past few days been cold. We started in New Mills. Cotton town, built to take advantage of the confluence of the two rivers here, the Goyt and the Sett, to run water wheels though they were later powered by steam engines. I’ve been reading so much about housing, about the rise of these early factories that had to be built where there was (water) power even though there were often no people, so the people had to be brought here, housed. They wanted families, because children are dead useful in mills.

And then the mills shut down. Now they are just picturesque additions to the quiet countryside. No noise, waste, streams of workers.

This is Torr Vale Mill, built around 1788 by Daniel Stafford, originally water powered and it continued working until 2000 — in use for over 200 years it was the longed continuously working manufacturing site in England.

This is taken standing in the ruins of Rock Mill, built around 1790 by John Crowther as a water powered cotton spinning mill. It changed hands and production many times, before becoming a print works in 1829. In 1872 it switched to paper, and was abandoned around 1884. I failed to photograph its remains.

This bridge above — amazing. This is taken from Torr Mill, built 1790 by the Schofield family, and remained in their ownership though with different tenants. Cotton production ceased in 1890, but was still in use by a cloth-cutting firm when on 2nd December, 1912 it caught on fire and the 5-story mill was destroyed. You can see the remains of it below through the arch — the chimney was its own. There is now a very fine hydraulic engine there, the UK’s first community owned and funded hydro electric scheme. Which is very cool indeed.

This place is awash with viaducts. They are all stunning.

Llama llama!

Smug sheep

Glacial winds, glacial! We did not climb the hills. Instead we opted for the shorter walk, following Overhill Road. So really, we did still climb some hills. Through the ice.

A mirrored pool of water, a heron. So beautiful.

Still over the hill. So beautiful. So cold. So so cold.

Archaeology, Environment & Justice, Smallholding, Sustainability

Farm archaeology: barrows, mines and medieval fields

June 24, 2016 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

The farm archaeology is fascinating here, and best of all there is a folder full of articles and reports on what can be seen, and what experts know about it. The information here comes from a report done by Frank Robinson in 2001 (FR), an English Heritage designation report (EH), and a lovely packet put together by a Geography teacher for the local secondary school (G). These maps are from Robinson:

The farm sits at the top in the middle. For the farmhouse – the house and stone buildings built in the late 18^th and early 19^th century, and they originally made cheese in what is now the kitchen (G). The oldest building stands along the lane and supposedly ‘from the lane can be seen a sandstone cheese press block used to fill part of an old doorway’ (FR). I read that too late to go look for it, coming to Glasgow meant I didn’t quite get to process everything. Whitewash (made of quicklime from the lime quarry on the farm itself) mixed with cow’s blood, dung, sand and horse hair worked as building mortar, and this was used in construction of the farm itself, along with more quarried limestone, and rubble infill.

The old shed along the lane:

The farm itself from the lane:

As interesting are the hedgerows – The presence of 8 different woody species age a hedge at roughly 500 years, the hedgerow here is probably about 800 years old due to the presence of 13 different woody shrubs: Hawthorn, Buckthorn, Guelder Rose, Holly, Elderberry, Willow, Hazel, Honesuckle, Field Maple, Field Rose, Dog Rose, Blackthorn and Ash (G).

Almost as cool is that the age of the hedgerow may show date of enclosure — Robinson notes that the land was enclosed by agreement so there is no act as such, probably the field boundaries were established by early 19^th century. These now serve as windbreaks and habitats for small mammals and birds – wrens, bank voles, badgers, foxes, rabbits. Other plants found here are wood anemone, townhall lock, goldilox buttercup, ground ivy, red campion, dog’s mercury, and lords and ladies (G). For years these would also have been the main source of firewood, and food as well — the tender shoots of hogweed boiled or steamed! Delicious.

Before enclosure these were open fields, plowed in a ridge and furrow pattern which shows the old medieval fields. These ridges were to be found all over the farm, but I found them difficult to see in many places. Apple Sitch Pingle (a name I never heard, this field was always top block) shows them clearly in the late afternoon light however, especially after mowing:

Robinson notes the meaning of this old field name – sitch is an old English word for a muddy stream, Apple probably a spelling of Aplow – low old English hlaw – hill or mound. Ap could refer to a hill or lost barrow. Pingle term often used to describe a meadow by the side of a stream.

You climb up to the top of the this and get the most lovely view of the farm and surrounding hills:

The next field up is Stanlow Close, between this and Stanlow Nobbs is:

The dew pond

These were needed before the existence of water mains and hoses. Built to provide water for upper fields, Robinson describes their building as almost a lost art. They were made with a special clay lining to retain water, sometimes ‘puddled with pig manure and dock leaves’. The Department of Agriculture ordered these filled in during the 1950s — there are evidence of several on the farm.

Continuing on to Stanlow Nobbs (limekiln field or the quarry to us) are

The barrows

Climbing up from the other side:

And another view of them (and me! Hello!):

The view from the top

From the very dry English Heritage Monument documents: There are two bowl barrows, joined by an earthwork ‘not yet fully understood’. Lucas and Carrington partially excavated one of the barrows in 1869, dated it to Bronze age and found a pottery urn, amber ring, perforated stone axe and bronze 3-rivetted dagger with ivory pommel (the axe and dagger are buried somewhere in the British Museum — they were once thought lost but refound, probably in a pile of things all gathering dust in London. I can’t help but feel they should have remained with their dead, or be found in the local museum). Cropmarks (3 rectangular marks of lush growth in dry weather) show probable location of Anglian secondary burials dating to c AD 700.

This would also be shared in common with Wigber Low — which is visible from here but this view of it makes it seem most unremarkable.

The cropmarks weren’t visible sadly. Robinson gives a bit more information — most such bowl barrows are from the Late Bronze Age, dating between 2400-1500 BC. Of these, there is actually some debate as to whether the smaller of the two is simply a natural mound, as well as the connecting ridge between them. This hasn’t yet been resolved as there has been no excavation since the 1800s.

Just to the other side of them, a rise followed by a dangerous drop off shows the presence of:

The Quarry

Climbing down and around it is beautiful here in the afternoon light:

This area is left uncut and ungrazed through July so rare limestone flora can grow as part of a conservation scheme – Stone Crop, Cowslip, Primroses, Wild Carrots, Sheep’s Bit Scabious and Field Scabious, Yarrow, Meadow saxifrage, Kidney Vetch and others:

Two quarries appear on 1850 tithe maps, by 1880 they had been combined and extended. In 1941, the farm owner (Jack Oakes) and a butcher in Ashbourne (Herbert Plumbley) were recorded as operators, and providing crushed Limestone for construction of Darley Moor – Ashbourne’s airfield during WWII.

This quarry is also the site of the

Lead Mine

The two were worked together. I wasn’t sure quite where the seam was to be found, assuming it to be somewhere amongst the rubble in the middle:

Lead mining was another way to supplement farm income, and lead was used widely before plastics became available, especially for plumbing. There are a number of records relating to the mining, and showed a number of people in the surrounding area had worked the quarry, not just the farmer. The more recent 20^th Century mine shaft has been explored by a local group, and they found evidence of folded iron rails and a wooden sleeper from narrow gauge track, as well as a winching beam standing over a shaft .

Other records are to be found in the Wirksworth Wapantake General Barmasters Book vols 24 and 77, though there were much older workings here as well. The English Heritage records note that this is described as a King’s Field, where the crown has the right to assign mining rights. The below is all from Robinson:

1806 land staked out as Bonyhole (bony hole) by William Bearisford of Weston. I know some of you will find that name hilarious, there is no speculation on its origin.

1938 H.G. Plumbley and John Oakes (the butcher/farmer combo) claimed a vein in the quarry with the Barmaster. In October and December 1948, two others (W.J. Brooks of Wirksworth and John Matkin of Carsington) applied to be given rights to work Bonyhole mine – notice was served on Plumbley on 23rd December ‘that unless his mine, Bonyhole is put in proper workmanship within 3 weeks it will be given away. Notice is also posted at the mine’. The new owner of New House Farm, Major F.C. Linnel-Gosling, then sent his own notice of registration as owner, saying that he had been working since Jan 1948 and that others had unlawfully taken lead from it.

Brooks returned the lead.

As of 1950 when Bob’s father bought the farm, I don’t think there was any longer activity in the quarry or mine.

Close to the quarry is also to be found a gravel pit:

Along with ruins of the:

Limekiln

Limestone used to be quarried both as a source of income and for the farm itself – quarried limestone was used as a building material of course, but could also be heated in a kiln to produce Calcium Oxide – Quicklime. This was sprinkled in plague graves to reduce infection. It was a also mixed with water to make slaked lime – ie whitewash — which was also known as ‘bug-binding’ as it disinfected walls in houses and barns and got rid of insects. Whitewash, as mentioned at the beginning, could also be mixed with blood, straw and sand to create mortar for building. All in all, limestone is a very useful material.

From the edge of the field you can look into Rye Close

Clearly used as a field for planting rye — once the main grain for consumption in this area. This was known to his parents as the football field as there used to be a football pitch on it! Old ridge and furrow is supposed to be visible from medieval plowing, but I couldn’t really see it. I’d have hated to play football on it.

Coming back down the central field you can some more of it though, not so much from the top

but further down, where the electric fence now keeps everything safe from the goats.

This place was rich in history, and visible markings of the different ways people not just grew food and raised livestock for survival here, but also dug out metals and processed rock. I so loved being part of this.

Strange after thinking of land and history in this way, to wake up to the news that we have left the EU. The area where I was voted overwhelmingly for leave…signs were posted everywhere, and I know a meeting of farmers was held to discuss the issue, and they were all for leave which disappointed the conveners immensely. An American friend asked what I thought about it all and I am still not sure, but this is sort of what is in my head — and I wished for us to remain.

Most of us are pretty depressed, because it feels like a vote for the right wing and xenophobia and racist anti-immigrant rhetoric and insularity and fear… and at the same time there was a strong left argument for leaving because the EU is a neoliberal shit that has been working to build a (metaphorical-ish) wall around the EU to stop all non-white immigrants from getting in (while allowing free movement within it) and pushing austerity and layers of bureaucracy without much accountability, and I’ve heard some argue it’s a working class vote against politics in general, which may be true — but seems as usual cities full of working class and immigrants tended to vote one way and rich and rural people who live in areas without immigrants voted another, with some exceptions for areas in the north that have been truly fucked economically for a very long time. Brixton/South London was 78% remain, and of course scotland also voted remain so another vote for their independence will probably take place again in light of this. It will be years two years at least, of course, before it ‘starts’ and at least one booming job market in legal wrangling and regulation writing. I wish I could celebrate Cameron’s resignation properly but I just can’t.

Many on my facebook feed see it is a failure of the (Blairite) left to respond to concerns of the working class facing stagnant wages and a shrinking economy and fewer and fewer services and opportunities.

But the news has been heartbreakingly unbearable lately, even more than usual. It hasn’t helped too much to spend every day working so hard physically to produce food rather than politically or with community as before, nor helped much to think of how many bloody and horrific periods of history these barrows or the ridge and furrows have existed alongside and survived, but it resets the perspective a little perhaps.

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Books, City & Country, Labour, Migrations

City and Country in Adam Bede

September 18, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

Evans published Adam Bede in 1859, describing events set in 1799 — it was 1721 that the first machinery was introduced into a silk mill in Derby and 1771 that Arkwright opened his cotton mill in Cromford. This is a turning point in industrial history and one she references, though fairly tangentially more’s the pity.

One of the things I got out of reading this, was that it continued the process of doing away once and for all with one of my stubborn blind spots — and I appreciate things that do that. Especially a blind spot that has continued in the face of constant small revelations — my simplistic working binary of clean pastoral countryside with its lovely clean towns and villages vs great dirty smoggy cities as centres of industry and innovation.

It’s just wrong.

It was especially wrong several hundred years ago, because multiple small villages served as dirty centres of industry and innovation. Many more held quarries, tanneries, and mines and etc — coal dust transformed whole landscapes that are today green and peaceful. I am ashamed that I have still been carrying that binary shit in my head and the only reason I know it was still there is because books and museums and unexpected clusters of mills and mines encountered in my ‘peak district back-to-nature holiday’ surprised me.

What is curious now, I suppose, is how much closer to reality it has actually become in ‘developed’ countries. How the dirt and grime and exploitation and innovation have been centralised and separated from daily life, its laborers moved to the cities, pollution’s existence in naturally beautiful peripheries cleaned up, and industry’s stories retold or simply erased in much of the countryside. This means of course, that the dirt and toxicity moved along to other places, other countries. So in a way my blind spot is the result of a great deal of effort, but whose? And why?

This isn’t even an attempt at an answer because I know it’s a whole complex combination of things that I could probably start listing right now involving capitalism and labour and etc. One place to start might be Lumsdale Valley, which held all kinds of toxic industry starting in the 1600s and is now a lushly and eerily beautiful series of preserved ruins.

Instead here are just some interesting passages from Adam Bede. In this one the man himself, country carpenter and half-peasant half-artisan (as described by George Eliot) praising the industrial revolution. Why? Because it’s happening within a few miles of him.

And there’s such a thing as being oversperitial; we must have something beside Gospel i’ this world. Look at the canals, an’ th’ aqueduc’s, an’ th’ coal-pit engines, and Arkwright’s mills there at Cromford; a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon. But t’ hear some o’ them preachers, you’d think as a man must be doing nothing all’s life but shutting’s eyes and looking what’s agoing on inside him.

A view of Masson Mill set in its landscape:

And the setting of Cromford Mill and its canal:

It is so hard, now, to understand that this was once ‘industrial’.

Sadly, this novel in almost its entirety takes place in ‘Hayslope’ which is really Ellastone, on the border of Derbyshire and Staffordshire. So eagerly awaiting references to Wirksworth, I was despairing (as already noted) several hundred pages into Hetty’s beauty as adorable as downy ducklings and the constant passive-aggressive wailing of Adam Bede’s mother and Dinah’s sermons on goodness and Methodism. But finally, we get to some descriptions of this beautiful stone town, quite rural and lovely to my own eyes. Here is Rev. Irvine to Dinah:

“Ah, I remember Snowfield very well; I once had occasion to go there. It’s a dreary bleak place. They were building a cotton-mill there; but that’s many years ago now. I suppose the place is a good deal changed by the employment that mill must have brought.”

She replies (and oh, if only this had centred on her life in ‘Snowfield’):

“It is changed so far as the mill has brought people there, who get a livelihood for themselves by working in it, and make it better for the tradesfolks. I work in it myself, and have reason to be grateful, for thereby I have enough and to spare. But it’s still a bleak place, as you say, sir–very different from this country.”

I suppose this is as much a shift in common perceptions of what is beautiful and what is country as it is my own blindspot. It’s also an interesting note on labour, those who moved first to smaller towns like these, seeking better lives. This happened alongside the importation of primarily children (not noted by Elliot of course) to work the mills. Both groups must have transformed these places.

This is the view over ‘bleak’ Wirksworth from Black Rocks — whose other side was once the site of a lead mine to be sure:

Curiously Dinah goes on to describe her own views on what the town-country distinction means for her preaching and gathering of souls, and Irvine responds.

“But I’ve noticed that in these villages where the people lead a quiet life among the green pastures and the still waters, tilling the ground and tending the cattle, there’s a strange deadness to the Word, as different as can be from the great towns, like Leeds, where I once went to visit a holy woman who preaches there. It’s wonderful how rich is the harvest of souls up those high-walled streets, where you seemed to walk as in a prison-yard, and the ear is deafened with the sounds of worldly toil. I think maybe it is because the promise is sweeter when this life is so dark and weary, and the soul gets more hungry when the body is ill at ease.”

“Why, yes, our farm-labourers are not easily roused. They take life almost as slowly as the sheep and cows. But we have some intelligent workmen about here.”

These are common enough prejudices against cities and people of the country even now of course…and perhaps Eliot had more of a hand in forming them than I know.

Here is Adam’s perception of Wirksworth — and it makes me think perhaps I am not quite so far off:

And when at last he came in sight of Snowfield, he thought it looked like a town that was “fellow to the country,” though the stream through the valley where the great mill stood gave a pleasant greenness to the lower fields. The town lay, grim, stony, and unsheltered, up the side of a steep hill, and Adam did not go forward to it at present, for Seth had told him where to find Dinah. It was at a thatched cottage outside the town, a little way from the mill–an old cottage, standing sideways towards the road, with a little bit of potato-ground before it. Here Dinah lodged with an elderly couple; and if she and Hetty happened to be out, Adam could learn where they were gone, or when they would be at home again.

I could have gone to see that same cottage, but I didn’t. We just didn’t get round to it. But here is where Mary Ann Evans visited her aunt:

It has more than its share of quarries to be sure

But look at this village:

Hardly dreary.

Eliot did occasionally write something I really liked, and this is one of them. I’ll end with another quote from Adam and something I definitely miss in the city:

I like to go to work by a road that’ll take me up a bit of a hill, and see the fields for miles round me, and a bridge, or a town, or a bit of a steeple here and there. It makes you feel the world’s a big place, and there’s other men working in it with their heads and hands besides yourself.

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City & Country, Labour

Masson Mill: the glories of early machinery

September 15, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

Masson Mill (built 1783) was Arkwright’s showpiece, constructed after his system was perfected at Cromford. The museum was amazing — not entirely because I now understand how this new revolution in weaving worked, but because I am so enamoured of these old machines (now that women and children are no longer at risk of losing fingers in them). And who wouldn’t love the world’s largest collection of bobbins? This made my photographer’s heart go pitter pat, and I truly mourned the temporarily comatose state of my SLR.

If I had to pick one amazing thing to highlight, it was these old punch cards that defined the patterns for weaving — and of course, served as the forerunners for computers.

But the rest, oh the rest was such a treat of extraordinary old iron, wheels and cogs, bobbins and threads. And the ghosts of workers, cut out and placed happily smiling at their visitors when actually this place must have been deafening with the noise, full of wisps of cloth and cotton dust and children running machinery…
[FAG id=3077]

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Country Walks Without a Car, Labour, Pillars of Capitalism, Walking

Mills, mills the very first mills

September 10, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 5 Comments

I’ve said before, it is so hard to believe that a significant part of what we call now the industrial revolution started in these beautiful valleys and hills — and for that reason the Derwent Valley is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. A copy of the book that was published based on the application to UNESCO was sitting on our shelf in the cottage — not the most gripping of styles but the content was quite fascinating none the less. Especially as one of these opening quotes is undoubtedly true:

The Arkwright system substituted capital for labour, machines for skill, factory for home, and mill discipline for family work routines. (15)
— David Jeremy, 1981.

This is where so much that now shapes modernity started, as strange as it seems in such beautiful surroundings. Cromford Mill was the world’s first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill, built between 1771 and 1790 by Richard Arkwright.

It was expanding on the technologies to be found down the road in Derby. In 1721 the opening of Lombe’s Silk Mill:

brought to England technology developed in Italy which enabled silk to be thrown on machines driven by water power. This important step towards full scale factory production did not on its own trigger rapid or widespread economic investment in mechanised production, but its influence on the later developments in the cotton industry which took place a few miles to the north, at Cromford, is now widely recognised. (15)

We spent more time in the country and at Arkwright’s showcase Masson Mill so didn’t explore too much this larger central complex, but it is impressive:

It was always more than buildings or machinery however, but also a whole new organisation of work, method of management, and also control over labour. Cromford became essentially a company town, with mill workers living in the housing that Arkwright built, shopping in his stores, and we heard, spending company scrip.

Cromford was relatively remote and sparsely populated, and Arkwright could only obtain the young people he required for his labour force if he provided homes for their parents. In Cromford, there emerged a new kind of industrial community which was copied and developed in the other Derwent Vallet settlements (15)

This system in its entirety was soon copied, and several other mills used ‘pauper labour’, building dormitories for large numbers of children. It is curious being outside this complex as it is so obviously built for security, with thick high walls, gates and no windows at ground level — so these copies emerged through industrial espionage or after the patents on the system had expired by 1785.

Arkwright’s associates Jedediah Strutt, Thomas Evans, and Peter Nightingale all became themselves mill owners — by 1788 there were over 200 Arkwright type mills established in Great Britain. For the first time I heard of ‘Traitor Slater’ or Samuel Slater, who apprenticed with Strutts in Milford and took technologies with him to US to found a new cotton weaving industry there along these lines. Johann Gottfried Brugelman pursuded a number of workers to move to Ratingen and installed the system in Germany.

Capital and technology crossing borders, expanding across the world. Somehow it is so poignant to see it here move so quickly, become so complete. This story embodies Marx’s theories about technology and competition, as Arkwright’s system composed of machinery and power transmission, the buildings, the production systems and labour management were all taken on in their entirety and then efforts made to improve on them.

New Lanark’s initial buildings developed with exactly this system, and Owens did not start working to change it along more philanthropic lines until 1799 — I’ve only just realised we went there while I had stopped blogging for a while, but it is an amazing place.

As the mill system outgrew the Derwent Valley, with its steep hills and limited room for expansion both in terms of space and labour, mill owners looked to move their operations. Cotton’s new centre moved to Manchester, leaving these mills preserved (sometimes falling down).

The money that was made here was evidenced by Arkwright’s private residence — Willersley Castle c 1790 — we only caught a glimpse of it through trees and had a laugh at its sign: Afternoon tea available all day!

Also St Mary’s Church, built 1797, his private — and very large — chapel:

He (in partnership with others) built the Cromford Canal in the early 1790s. Originally intended as a through route between the mills and Manchester, it was soon replaced by the Cromford and High Peak Railway built between 1824 and 1830s.

I so love canals, I am glad they have brought back this one, and are looking to connect it once again to the canal network.

This is Leawood pumphouse 1849, which housed a steam pumping engine to increase supply of water to the canal:

We also walked down (well, up and up and up some more first) to Lea Bridge and Smedley’s (formerly Nightingale’s) Mill. It was built in 1783 by Peter Nightingale — Arkwright’s financier and landlord in Cromford — and Benjamin Pearson, a formerly trusted employee. It was built in anticipation of the patents expiring, and must have been the source of no small amount of social tension and generated a lawsuit. In 1818 John Smedley took over. Smedley’s is still running and much expanded, newer building having surrounded the old mill which they say still remains at the core. They continue to be a major employer in the area.

Florence Nightingale was one of these Nightingale’s, Peter being her great-uncle, and she spent quite a lot of time here, so there is a community hall named after her.

More on the inside of the mills with the obscene amount of amazing photographs from Masson Mill, built by Arkwright as a showpiece and consolidating everything he had learned from the earlier buildings and operations. But later.

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Archaeology, Country Walks Without a Car, Labour, Walking

Caudwell Flour Mill and Mill Stones Left Behind

September 6, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 2 Comments

In every city, town and village we have walked past old mills, now repurposed and turned into luxury flats most of them. It was good to see one still running as a mill, and even better to learn it was open as a museum. It was such a pleasure to walk around a working mill, see the history of past innovations. Had we not been about to embark on a walk of many miles up several large hills, we would have bought some flour…

Some of the exhibits discussed the changing technologies — both the move from the beautiful old water wheels that to my mind still signify a mill to the new water turbines that so much more efficiently powered the machinery, and the use of rollers to grind grain rather than the great circular millstones. Once upon a time mills were a ubiquitous feature of towns, villages and cities — I loved this map that showed just how many there once were in this area along the river systems:

The change in the grinding of grain to bake our bread is just one of the changes that modernity has brought to our lives, a change to both the rhythm of our days and the food that we eat. I wonder if we can even guess now just how great a change that has been.

The machinery inside was wonderful

The Hammer Mill — ‘Miracle Mill’ No. 2, used to pulverize stock into powder:

Measurers and grain elevators:

Flour sifters at all levels of fineness, and their machinery:

This was less the amazing old machinery, and more the title — Baron “Dreadnought” Grinder:

You climb story after story, here is a view of the beautiful country from the top:

An old dust collector at the very top, of exquisite carpentry surrounded by bewildering belts and struts

This area was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, which impacted upon flour mills as much as mills of any other kind — the Caudwell Mill was in the forefront of some of these changes. It was fascinating to continue our walk, get a bit lost per usual, and stumble across further remnants of this past. Not without first passing one of the most lovely farms I’ve seen:

and a chicken crossing a road — though too far away for questions:

We climbed up into the woods

We think we had already gone wrong at this point, but I could not be sorry. Because then we found this:

Something to do with the quarry we think, though perhaps another mill. Up through more forest

More ruins:

To find a fallen stack of old mill stones — victims of technological change left here unwanted and unneeded…

and perhaps this was part of the end of these quarries, now reclaimed by the forest and more beautiful thereby.

This is heading up to Stanton Moor, which was more beautiful still, but more on that later. Better to sit with thoughts of human endeavour, how much everything has changed, what happened to technologies left behind and the men who once excelled in them…

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Country Walks Without a Car, Environment & Justice

Lumsdale Valley ruins

September 2, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 2 Comments

After a brief and beautiful losing of ourselves, we arrived exactly where we had been going — a series of two ponds in the Lumsdale Valley created to power the mills below, a centre of industry for several hundred years.

This whole area just south of the Peak District is a centre of industry, the springboard for the industrial revolution — though you would never guess now.

Cottages stand where an old lead smelter once sat, along with a counting house and ore house, from 1749 through the 1780s. One of the mills is perhaps from the 1600s, and a cycle of uses, from saw mill to paint mill to spinning and bleach — all of it happened in this stretch of buildings.

Starting with the old saw mill and moving through the valley — it no longer felt so important to recognise old uses, try to understand old processes and imagine what this scene looked like several hundred years ago:

Instead I wished I looked upon it with a practiced eye, so the layers of meaning and history could be sifted, brought forward in turn to form a whole. At no point in this place do you want to treat it as a museum. We didn’t linger long at the informative boards, and I am glad they remain few.

An early bleach trough, where they bleached skeins of yarn (and I imagine how toxic it all was, continues to be though you would never now guess):

This is never how I once imagined sedate English woods.

An old square paint trough, I think, I am looking back now with charts at these pictures, they don’t quite match memory, but that is all right. To the left a tunnel that once led to a bridge across the stream. A curiosity now. A place to hide from other visitors and pretend they are not there.

We wandered down the valley through one building and then another, alongside the stream for a while and the series of waterfalls that once brought power. It is hard, now, for me to imagine waterfalls as useful.

The Bleach works, with an old millstone.

The smithy:

I left the valley sadly. From there we climbed and lost ourselves again briefly through poor walk instructions, then wandered along the curve of a hill to looking back over Matlock from another angle:

Finally arriving at Starkholmes, and a well earned meal. And a cat.

then back down the hill to the bus, through a gimlet of holiday makers enjoying Matlock Bath. The Paignton of the North. Which I might ignore, but the country’s first pleasure parks were there? I meant to look into that a little more…

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The dew pond

The barrows

The Quarry

Lead Mine

Limekiln

Just communities. Just cities. Just connections between country and city. Also, the weird and wonderful.