Water and Steam at Brackwater Mill

Standing in the quiet valley of the River Brack today, surrounded by birdsong and the sound of running water, it is difficult to imagine the noise that once filled it. For more than a century, Brackwater Mill spun cotton for the weavers of the surrounding towns, and at its peak in the 1850s it employed nearly four hundred people, a third of them children. The mill closed in 1931, but because its later owners used the buildings for storage rather than demolishing them, the whole complex has survived, and it is now one of the few places in the country where a visitor can trace, on a single site, the transition from water power to steam.

The founders chose the location for one reason: the river. The River Brack, which forms the northern boundary of the site, falls steeply at this point, and a weir built across it diverted part of its flow into a channel leading to the mill pond at the western end of the complex. The pond acted as a store of energy, allowing the mill to keep working through dry spells when the river was low. From the pond, water was released through a sluice into the wheel house, a tall, narrow building squeezed between the pond and the western end of the main mill, where a wooden wheel almost eight metres across turned the machinery through a system of shafts and gears.

The Spinning Mill itself is a five-storey block of local sandstone, its long walls pierced by rows of identical windows that admitted as much daylight as possible to the spinning floors. Inside, cast-iron columns support the floors, an innovation adopted after a disastrous fire destroyed the original timber-framed building in 1792. Each floor once held dozens of spinning machines, and the vibration was so intense that workers claimed they could feel it in their beds at night. The air was kept warm and humid, because cotton thread snaps easily in dry conditions, and the combination of heat, dust and noise left many workers with damaged lungs and impaired hearing by middle age. Several of the original machines have been recovered from a museum store and reinstalled on the ground floor.

By the 1830s, water alone could no longer meet the demands of the expanding business, and the owners turned to steam. At the opposite end of the mill from the wheel, they added the engine house, which contained a beam engine that drove the same system of shafts. Steam for the engine was raised in the boiler house, which stands immediately to the south of the engine house, and the smoke was carried away by the chimney, a square brick stack rising beside the boiler house in the south-eastern corner of the site. Restorers discovered that the water wheel was not abandoned when steam arrived; instead, the two sources of power were used together, with the engine taking over only when the pond ran low. This careful economy, the guides explain, was typical of mill owners, who disliked paying for coal when water was free.

South of the mill lies the Mill Yard, an open cobbled space where raw cotton was unloaded and finished yarn loaded onto carts. Workers entered the site from Mill Lane, which runs along the southern edge of the complex, and crossed the yard to reach the mill. Overlooking the yard from its western side is the Counting House, the office from which the manager supervised the workforce and where wages were paid every Saturday. Its windows were positioned so that he could see everyone who came and went.

Perhaps the most moving building on the site is the apprentice house, a plain stone building that stands south of the Counting House, alongside Mill Lane. Here, children as young as eight, many of them orphans sent from workhouses in distant cities, slept two or three to a bed and were given a basic education on Sunday afternoons. The trust that manages the site has deliberately left the building almost bare, furnished with little more than a few iron beds and a table, so that visitors can grasp how harsh the apprentices' lives must have been.

The restoration is not yet complete. The trust hopes to return the water wheel to working order within the next five years, and it is raising funds to repair the chimney, which has lost several courses of brick to frost. Meanwhile, the mill attracts a growing number of visitors, many of them descendants of the families who once worked here.