Quarry Bank Mill

[purplecat]

We went to Quarry Bank Mill on New Year's Eve. This is a National Trust property consisting of a Cotton Mill, Mill Stream and Gardens and Apprentice House. Despite it being very close to us we had never seen it because Marmalade Sparrow was taken by school at some point and never wanted to go again! She claimed no memory of this experience or injunction when asked. We elected to go there entirely because the weather was doubtful and the Mill was open - unlike most other properties in the area where only the gardens were open.

It was a nice change from a lot of the Country House fare one normally gets with National Trust properties. In particular it had a lot of working machinery, including the mill wheel and several generations of spinning and weaving machines, many in working order with people present to demonstrate them in action! You could watch the cotton go through from fluffy bales, to strips of cotton wool, to cotton thread and then watch it woven into cloth. As usual, as well as plenty of interpreters, there were many information boards detailing life in the mill - it took us an embarrassingly long time to figure out how the maths of the mill population worked since it was supposed to be a "job for life" but also employed more children than men and women put together. There was also a second looking at how the slave trade interacted with the cotton industry (the kind of thing that has become surprisingly controversial in recent years, with a pressure group dedicated to returning the NT to its glory days and, presumably, excising all mention of slavery from its properties).

Also, as usual, there was a good restaurant serving hearty food, a shop and, less usual, a second-hand bookshop. Some elected to remain in the bookshop while the rest of us seized the opportunity of a break in the weather to explore the grounds. B. and I chose to wonder upstream to view the weir that controlled the water that powered most of the mill and which is now part of a small hydro-electric station.






A spinning Jenny!

Comments

[senmut]

Awesome. Thank you for sharing.

And yes, it's a common problem over here. IF the slavery has been acknowledged, it's being swept back under the carpet at some venues.

[purplecat]

So many of our fancy country houses were financed to some extent or other by money from slavery, but it's not something that has been openly acknowledged much until recently because there were so few slaves (comparatively speaking) actually in the UK so it's less visible in the history - so that's part of the push back, a kind of "but there's nothing to see _here_ so why bring it up?". But it does seem ridiculous that it's become an entire organisation devoted to seizing control of one of our big historic trusts in order to censor what can be said on information boards.