Publication Account

Date 1986

Event ID 1017625

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1017625

Monuments of Industry - an illustrated historical record

This mill, built 1883 on the E bank of the River Som, is typical of the smaller country business and primarily of interest for the machinery it contains and the traditional methods employed for processing the wool from its raw state, through the various stages, to the finished product. Plainly constructed of local rubble masonry, it comprises a gable-ended main block of three storeys, and a single-storeyed S wing, all originally slated. The upper floors are of wooden beam-and-joist construction carried on two intermediate rows of posts, and the E gable incorporated a loading-door at each level designed initially for admitting machinery.

The layout of the machinery and equipment, some of which are among the last specimens of their kind to survive in Britain, is noted on the plans in their sequence of use. All the powered machinery was driven by a low breast-shot iron water-wheel with an unusual chain-drive mechanism,situated against the wall inside the s wing. Briefly, the process involved preparing the raw wool by breaking it down into smaller pieces in a teasing-machine, carding it in a scribbler to remove its initial coarseness, then in a similar two-cylinder carder to form it into more uniform strips, which were cast automatically on to a piecing-machine designed to join them into continuous strands. The bulky nature of the strands, or rovings, required them to be processed into a leaner yarn in a slubbing-billy on the first floor, before the yarn was suitable for spinning in the jenny; it could be further refined in a second jenny, The spun yarn was next formed into hanks on the second floor and then washed and dyed in the dye-house. Having been woven in one or other of the power- or hand-looms, the finished cloth, whether of tweeds, rugs or blankets, went through a final process of washing and shrinking in the milling-machine, following which it was dried on tenter frames, situated on high ground behind the weaver's cottage. Suiting material went through a further stage of being folded and pressed in a cloth-press worked by means of a turn-screw which compressed a series of heated metal plates inserted between the folds of cloth. The piecing-machine, slubbing-billy and jenny have been selected for more detailed study in Section 5.

Information from ‘Monuments of Industry: An Illustrated Historical Record’, (1986).