Monday we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast before journeying to nearby Styal for our tour of Quarry Bank Mill–a beautifully preserved cotton mill from the early 1840s, complete with the workers’ village, apprentice house, and gardens. If you’ve read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South or watched the BBC film adaptation, you can imagine the setting perfectly.
Getting to the mill proved a bit of a challenge once we arrived at the Manchester Airport train station and bus stand. When Suzi and I did the mill on our recce trip last year, we had quite a time with the bus and realized it was going to be a challenge to manage the route. So, as much as we wanted to add Stockport’s Hat Museum to our itinerary, we deliberately planned to do only the mill and nothing else on Monday. This turned out to be a good idea!
When we arrived at Manchester airport, the bus wasn’t at the stand, so we assumed it had already left (two minutes early?). However, after waiting in vain for the bus to loop back around, I checked the information desk and found the 200 bus had never showed up that morning, and the company was sending a mini-bus instead! When that arrived, it only held 14 of our group, so the rest of us dashed up to the taxi stand and hired two cabs. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
Quarry Bank Mill sits down in a river valley surrounded by green hills. Its owners lived on the property and built an entire village to house their workers in a clean and convenient location. During the early days of the Industrial Revolution, child labor was all too common, but the owners of Quarry Bank were considered quite forward-thinking to provide a school for the children and workers’ comp for injured mill laborers.
Walking though the mill really provides a window on the time, and you can never again take a simple spool of thread for granted! It was incredibly dangerous work to manage the winding and weaving machines, and many people died or were left crippled for life in the process. The National Trust has done an amazing job of preserving this amazing site so we can all learn from it now.
My son is a wonderful photographer and captured a lot of shots of flowers (aren’t you proud, Grammie?)
I’ll blog later tonight about our day at Platt Hall if all goes well!
Historical Fashion Tours with Sense & Sensibility 