In the valleys of Ceredigion lies an increasingly hidden reminder of a hand weaving trade that had all but disappeared everywhere else across Britain. It didn’t start here, as the wool industry predominantly started, surprise surprise, in agricultural areas of the country where the vast majority of the sheep were. In the 17th & 18th century this was first and foremost in East Anglia, such as the flat planes of Norfolk. The weaving industry started there, and with the industrial revolution began to head west towards the Midlands and further afield into Wales. The coal industry headed through the Black Country, and steam power enabled such industries to travel to places previously untouched by the trade. One great benefit of this was that the atmosphere in the valleys and mountainous regions of Britain better suited the yarn. There was nowhere that better proved this than in Talybont, Ceredigion where a small business established itself in the late 1700’s and operated through the generations along the river Leri that passed through this small hamlet just a few miles from the west coast of Wales. The site itself is reputed to have been a smeltery and stamp mill established in the 1640s by Thomas Bushell for processing silver and lead ores, and later there is thought to have been a corn mill on the site. A long line of efforts to harness the flow of the river to generate an industry and thereby income and livelihood for the village itself through the ages.
Throughout this article you will see images of the mill from the early 1970’s which documented a John Hughes, who is still alive today in the village (or was at the time of our first visit) and was the last master weaver at the mills and lived in the cottages on the street where the staff would enter the factory from the village. Much of what was documented back then still remains and can be seen in my images taken after roughly four decades of nature settling in.
We start at the river itself, where the driving force of the mill began. The main wheel was never replaced, and was the original one installed on site, producing 17 horsepower. The fulling stock, wheel and gears occupy the remains of the north-eastern end of the mill. The 6.1m diameter back-shot water wheel has the words ‘Samuel Owens Newtown Foundry 1858’ and had 40 wooden buckets and an iron axle. The wheel is attached to a pair of large primary gears, a shaft running from these, through the factory wall to drive the upper gear system, operating the entire process. Despite seeming somewhat primitive from the outside, these were significant pieces of kit.
The producer of the wheel was Newtown Mill, formerly known as Burnley Iron Works and Newtown Steelworks, was located on Queen's Lancashire Way. Burnley Iron Works was a large engineering firm which made more than sixty textile mill wheels and engines to power cotton mills all around Britain.
