Styal and Quarry Bank Mill

 On Thursday evening, we had to pick the young man and his girlfriend up from Manchester airport, and so hubby and I decided we would go late afternoon and make a bit of a day of it.  The pretty village of Styal, and the mill at Quarry Bank lie just behind the airport and are lovely to stroll around.  The village was built to house workers at the nearby cotton mil and I believe most of the houses are owned by the National Trust who now run the estate.

The little houses are so pretty and the village setting is perfect.

 I think I spotted Quince growing in the orchard.

 We wandered across the fields to where the mill sits.

 We used to visit Quarry Bank Mill lots when the kids were young.  This is the apprentice house where orphaned or abandoned children were housed whilst providing free labour at the mill. Whilst my children thought it was great fun to dress as Victorian waifs and pretend to sleep on a straw filled mattress, the reality of life for these poor children would have been horrific - but much better than the workhouse.

 The children were educated and fed here in return for working very long days in the mill - usually in very dangerous jobs.  They also had to tend the gardens after work.  Children would have been as young as 6 years old and often lost fingers and limbs working under the machinery in the mill, or just dropped dead from exhaustion.

 The mill itself is a magnificent building, but the similarity to a prison is striking.  It sits in a very beautiful valley on the river Bollin which is quite unusual as most mills of this size were built in towns and cities.

 If you visit the mill during opening times, they have a couple of the machines running - and they are really noisy.  It must have been a tremendous noise when all the machines were running at the same time.  Most mill workers did lose their hearing very young.

 The mill was built and owned by Samuel Greg.  He pioneered the factory movement in the UK and was considered to be fairly benevolent to his workforce, but conditions were still horrific.  Like Salts Mill in Saltaire, it must have been better for the workers to live out here in the countryside than suffer the awful conditions in the city.

.We also had time to have a quick wander around nearby Wilmslow  which is a very affluent town - home to many northern celebrities and Manchester footballers.  The estate agents windows are always a bit of a laugh - 6.5 million pounds was not the highest price we saw either!

 And apparently this Aston Martin dealerships sells the most cars of any  of its dealerships in the UK.  Hubby's face was a picture as we wandered around.