FOULRIDGE V BARLICK ROUND FIVE.

[Stanley]

FOULRIDGE V BARLICK ROUND FIVE.

I want to finish our look at the map of Whitemoor by having a close look at County Brook Mill. I rely heavily here on information from the Wilfred Spencer papers and from Raymond Mitchell, the present owner of the mill who wrote a splendid booklet about it in 1994. Helen Spencer, Wilfred’s widow, gave me other clues, largely connected with estate maps.
There is mention of Hullet Nest Farm and a mill in an indenture of 29th August 1785 in which the owners were Joseph Hartley of Cragg (Foulridge), Margaret his wife and Daniel Parker of Hague, yeoman. The mill changed its name frequently. In 1828 it is Hey Mill, in 1838 New Mill, in 1910, Stew Mill and I have heard some call it Mitchell’s Mill. The first mention I have found of it is on a map of the Midgely Estate in 1810 when it was described as a worsted mill, in other words processing wool. This was very early for power weaving and I would suggest it was a spinning mill and therefore, according to Chris Aspin, very rare. Raymond Mitchell told me that when his grandfather took over the mill it was three storied and there was evidence of corn milling having been carried on there, he found millstones in the basement in 1907.
The water frame for spinning came into general use round about 1785 so it may well have been a corn mill up to that point. Raymond has a sale notice in his possession dated June 1842 for the Hullet Nest Farm. A William Hewson and his wife Betty Hartley were the owners at the time, in the description of land and property ‘the cotton mill Hey Mill’ is mentioned. The vendor reserved the right to remove the ‘engine, boiler house and waterwheel’ unless the purchaser wished to keep them at a cost of £30. So from this we know that Hey Mill had embraced change, had changed to cotton and was supplementing the water power with a steam engine. The buyers were William and John Midgely, hat manufacturers of Colne and they paid £1440. [The mention of a steam engine interests me. We know that by 1827 another Mitchell in Barlick (no relation) had an engine running to supplement his water wheel at what later became Clough Mill because George Ingle found the insurance records for it (See his book ‘Yorkshire Cotton.) Hey Mill could be a contender for the first engine in Barlick.]
The practice of installing an engine to work in conjunction with a water wheel was common. What isn’t immediately obvious is that there were other advantages from this arrangement beyond simply increasing the power available. Any form of textile machinery works best at one particular speed. One of the major disadvantages of water power was the fact that it is very difficult to guarantee constant speed. Governors were sometimes fitted to them but were almost useless in because their response time was so slow. With the advent of steam water power users soon realised that if they installed an engine in the power train and ran the water wheel at full flow, topping up the power with the engine, they could control speed far more accurately by varying the steam to the engine controlled by a governor. This steadier speed increased production, cut down on yarn breakage and put profits up. Another surprising benefit which Dr Mary Rose proved by her work on Quarry Bank Mill at Styal is that steam power was cheaper than water power so profits went up for this reason also. Water power looks as if it ought to be free but in practice the maintenance of the wheel and it’s water resource was very expensive.
The 1851 census records three families as living at Hullet Nest (now known as Owlet Nest) and all are connected with textiles, two of them as handloom weavers of wool. Two old women, one 65 and the other 69 are described as bobbin winders but this is almost certainly in connection with the domestic industry. In other words, no evidence that there was any activity at the mill.
In the 1861 census there is again no mention of any textile trade connected with the mill. This was the time of the Cotton Famine and this may be the reason. However, in the same census a man called Edmund Riley of ‘Hullet Nest’ is described as farmer of 27 acres and ‘Mordant Maker’. He was in partnership with a man called William Yates in this business. (Mordant is a term used in dyeing to describe a chemical which fixes the colour in the cloth.) This fits in with the name ‘Stew Mill’ because we know that this was coined when the site was used for charcoal making. The wood was ‘stewed’ in closed vessels and the vapour which came off was distilled and produced a range of chemicals from light fractions like wood alcohol and naphthalene through phenols to heavy distillates like Stockholm Tar. This process was a valuable source of chemicals before the advent of the petro-chemical industry. Raymond says that in 1928 there were still retorts in the mill and tanks containing liquor.
The waterwheel at Hey Mill was 34 feet in diameter and four feet wide. During the 1950’s the mill ran on water power supplemented by an oil engine. By the end of the decade the shed was electrified and it became uneconomic to use the original power. The wheel was demolished in 1960 and the shaft can still be seen in the mill yard.
On March 27th, 1876 William Mitchell was born at Ryecroft, Bingley and he was to become owner of the mill at County Brook in 1907. We know he worked in the quarries at Barnoldswick initially and in 1907 when he left Salterforth Mill he was a tackler and so would have been in the trade for some years. By 1907 canal traffic was falling off die to competition from the railways so the irregular water supply that had dogged the mill ever since the Canal Company bought the lease of the water in 1815 and then built Whitemoor reservoir would be easing. Perhaps this was just the time for an intelligent man to step in and take advantage of the low price of a small disused watermill when everyone else was thinking steam power and larger units. Whatever happened, on Nov 11th 1910 the Nelson Leader printed a piece describing ‘Stew Mill’ as a weaving mill running 36 looms. Charcoal production and wood distilling was still being carried on and the article mentions the fact that production has not had to stop for shortage of water ‘for the last two or three years’. The mill was subsequently enlarged and additional power obtained from an oil engine. It is now electrified and still, at the time of writing in 2000, producing cloth and in the ownership of the Mitchell family.
Looking at the County Brook as a whole, its potential importance as a water power source was blighted in 1815 when the Canal Company took control of the water. The one thing that water-powered industry needs above all others is an uninterrupted supply. The Company had only one interest, to let down the water when it suited them for the operation of the canal, this obviously conflicted with interests of the mills who needed continuous water day and night. By day the flow ran the mill, by night it filled the dam and gave a reserve for the following day. This single fact explains the chequered history of the mills on the watercourse between 1815 and 1907. The degree of success that William Mitchell achieved at County Brook Mill was almost certainly connected with the decreased usage of water by the canal as traffic dropped. If you want to speculate further about this, consider what might have happened if the canal hadn’t taken the water at all. County Brook would have had a better water resource than Kelbrook, Foulridge or Salterforth and might have developed into a prosperous village. This may seem far-fetched when we look at the present-day rural setting of County Brook Mill but it could all have been much different.
Back to the Black Brook. The 1580 map shows it flowing away through Salterforth Bottoms in the general direction of Kelbrook and Earby. It is joined there by a tributary marked as ‘Mearclough Water’, this is what is now known as Lancashire Gill which is the continuation of the county boundary. It rises above Mere Clough Farm on the original road between Foulridge and Kelbrook. The road below which is the main road today is relatively new. Mrs Tordoff, who was about 90 years old when she lived in on Stone Row in Kelbrook in 1957 once told me that when she was a girl her mother told her that this road used to end at the Stone Trough Inn and became a cart track into the fields. It became a major road when it became the Colne-Skipton turnpike in the 18th century.
I say the water ‘flowed’ towards Earby, this is a bit optimistic actually. The bottoms between Foulridge and Earby are on the watershed between the Aire and Ribble river systems and there is very little fall to get the water away. In 1580 the whole valley was a bog in all but the driest times. Sometime in the 18th century Dutch drainage experts were brought in to construct the New Cut to improve the drainage of water towards Earby and away through Thornton bottoms. I have heard it said that this is the origin of the name Hague in the valley. I’m a bit wary of this as I’ve also come across an inference that it was called after the disease ague, which was a fever contracted by living in wet areas. Place names can be very deceptive and until I have some better information I’ll keep my options open on that one. [The English Place Name Society suggest that it comes from OE ‘Heigh’ an area enclosed by a hedge, the generally accepted root of the place name ‘Hey’ which is so common in West Craven.]
What is certain is that in 1840 when the Canal Company built Whitemoor Reservoir and appropriated most of the water for the canal apart from a small amount they would have had to let down the original Black Brook by law, they would have improved the situation in Sough and Earby quite considerably as regards flooding. I lived in Sough in the late 1950’s and can remember that Lane Bottoms at Earby flooded regularly. I wonder whether this was a reversion to the days before the canal because the Leeds and Liverpool was almost abandoned then, commercial traffic had ceased and pleasure traffic was only just starting. One can imagine that more water was coming down the bottoms than at any time since the canal was built. One more comment before we leave this subject, Sough is the local name for a drain.
As you can see, there is a lot more work to be done on County Brook and the three mills. It seems obvious that from 1815 onwards the use of the water for the canal blighted Midge Hole and County Brook Mill. The fate of Wood End is slightly more obscure. All I can say at the moment is that it seems to have fallen out of use before County Brook Mill was started and there must be a possibility that the stones in County Brook Mill might have been from Wood End, they weren’t the sort of thing you moved far unless you had to. Perhaps County Brook Mill started life as the successor to Wood End corn mill?
One word about millstones while we are on the subject. The nearest source I know for millstones is at the top of Noyna above Foulridge. If you take a walk up there you’ll find stones half cut and some that were flawed and broke while they were being worked. I came across an account somewhere, I have an idea it was in the Barcroft Diaries which used to be held at Pendle Heritage, of two stones being brought down from the quarry. A shaft was fixed between the centres of the two stones so that they were like two cart wheels on an axle. A pair of oxen was yoked up at the front and another at the back to act as a brake and the wheels were moved like that. From the middle of the 19th century, English millstones went out of fashion, built up, iron bound ‘French Burrs’ were imported as they were much harder than native stone.
Right, I think that’s the end of our look at the 1580 map. Remember what I always say, these accounts are never complete, there is always something new to learn about them. What I have done over the last few weeks is to lay out some of the more obvious points, there is plenty left to do and all sorts of discoveries to make. As for the court case, we don’t even know officially who won until someone goes to the records and looks it up, probably in the Public Record Office in London. Whatever the verdict, Whitemoor stayed within the boundaries of Barlick so I suppose if you were desperate for a result you could say that Barlick won!