Brighouse Lower Mill

I’ve now lived in Brighouse for nearly 20 years. This little town neighbours the much bigger town of Huddersfield, where I was born and grew up. Like all towns in this area, known as ‘the industrial West Riding’, both are mill towns with a strong textile heritage. Huddersfield’s mills specialised in wool textiles, whereas the Brighouse textile industry was more varied. Though Brighouse’s earliest mills, including Brighouse Lower Mill, processed wool, most of the mills built here during the 19th Century specialised in cotton or silk.

Brighouse Lower Mill was the first textile mill here. It was built in the late 15th century on the River Calder, the large waterway that is the namesake of my local area, Calderdale, and which runs through the centre of Brighouse. The origins of the mill are found in a deed of indenture between Thomas Lacy and John Gybson in 1478 which detailed the terms of lease for an existing corn mill and licence for John to also ‘build a fulling mill on suitable ground in Bryghous’. The resulting fulling mill survived for around 400 years. From 1571 it was owned by the Armytage family, and remained part of their extensive Brighouse property holdings until it was sold to the Hebble and Calder Navigation Company in 1816 as part of a major land sale. It was at that time still operating as a fulling mill, as seen from the sale catalogue in which was listed equipment at the mill that included ‘three waterwheels; seven doubling fulling stocks; one single and three double drivers; and, for the purpose of fulling cloth, also 70 inches of card for scribbling and carding wool, and eight blocks of working wire’. Alas, Brighouse Lower Mill was demolished in 1887. However, thanks to George Hepworth, the architect who was responsible for some of Brighouse’s Victorian mill developments, and whom was also a local historian and founding member of Brighouse’s photographic society, I can show you (see below) a photograph of the mill taken in 1885. The building behind the bridge was Brighouse Lower Mill. The many-storeyed building to the right of it is Mill Royd, built in Victorian times to be a cotton mill but recently transformed into prestigious residential apartments.

‘Fulling’ is a finishing process for woollen cloth. It involves beating the cloth in water and cleansing agents (stale urine and/or fullers earth) to degrease and felt it. This vastly increases the strength of the cloth and makes it very weather-resistant. In ancient times the beating was done by human feet, trampling or ‘walking’ the cloth to felt it. Because of this fulling mills were also known as ‘walking mills’, although in medieval times the practice was mechanised, using large wooden hammers driven by water wheels to beat the cloth.

These illustrations from 17th century engineering books show what the fulling machinery in Brighouse Lower Mill may have looked like:

A ‘head’ of water, ie water descending from a height, is needed to operate a waterwheel. To create this many mills created an artificial mill pond, while many other mills instead operated next to a weir. Both of Brighouse’s ancient mills (the corn mill and the fulling mill) used the latter system. Weirs were built in the river to impede the river’s flow, and some of the volume of water thus gathered was redirected into side channels cut next to the river. The waterwheels were located in these man-made channels. This arrangement is detectable in two map illustrations I have seen that show Brighouse’s two old mills straddling side channels of the River Calder. The first image below is from Thomas Jefferys 1771 map of Yorkshire. It shows the island that was created in Brighouse when the Calder and Hebble canal was cut in 1764. The two mills sit on the southern edge of that island, straddling channels between that island and two much smaller islands that had been created by cutting the channels for the waterwheels. At the time of this map there was only one river bridge at Brighouse, connecting us to Rastrick. This bridge was immediately to the west of the corn mill, the leftmost of the two mills in this illustration.

In 1825 another bridge was built for the Huddersfield road. This bridge was located immediately to the west of the fulling mill. The image below is from a map illustration in ‘The History of Brighouse, Rastrick and Hipperholme’, a book by Joseph Horsfall that was published in 1892. It shows the weir as well as the fulling mill; ‘Low Mill’.

Both weirs have survived to the present day, as can be seen in this cropped screenshot from google maps. It delights me that we have such a major physical remnant of Brighouse’s ancient wool heritage!