Summer Trip : Cromford Mill

In the mid-Eighteenth Century Richard Arkwright, a wig maker from Preston, perfected a whacky new machine to spin strong cotton yarn suitable for use as both the warp and weft when weaving fabric on a loom. Not only could one of these ‘spinning frames’ spin lots of threads at once, but many of them could be linked up to a power source, so producing really large quantities of yarn. In order to develop his ideas, Arkwright came to Cromford near Matlock, an isolated area in the Derbyshire hills with an unlimited supply of fast flowing water from a hill stream and the drainage sough of a lead mine.....