New Lanark

Started: 2024-09-02 10:23:07

Submitted: 2024-09-02 17:50:29

Visibility: World-readable

Scotland's industrial history, with a side of imperialism

On my last full day in Glasgow, I took the train from Glasgow Central to Lanark to see the mill town New Lanark, now preserved as a historic site. There was only one train to Lanark per hour, which departed from the main-level platform. This marked the first time I'd actually departed from the main level, despite having spent a week in Glasgow and taking suburban service from the lower-level platforms.

One of the passengers in the waiting area on the station concourse in front of the fare gates was coughing noisily so I decided to wait somewhere else, but he turned up on my train sitting across the aisle from me, still coughing. This was the one point during the trip where I decided to wear a mask, because I was hoping I wouldn't catch whatever infection he had.

It rained most of the way to Lanark. I watched the Scottish countryside outside the train window, a series of forests and bright green pastures dotted with the occasional flock of sheep under the gray sky.

When we arrived in Lanark the rain had turned into a heavy mist and the sky remained gray and wet. The railway station at the town of Lanark is on the hill above the river valley where New Lanark is located, and actually getting down the hill was more complicated than one might hope. The local bus company operated one bus per hour but neglected to time the bus so it lined up with the train; to catch the bus I would have to wait 35 minutes and then the bus would take 20 minutes to circulate the town and eventually take me down the hill. Instead I took a half-hour walk down the hill in the mist, through the town of Lanark and down the hill to the preserved and restored new town.

I found the visitor's center and began my orientation with a video that gave a brief history of the town and its decline and preservation. The mills at New Lanark were opened in 1786 to take advantage of the water power provided by the River Clyde, and the town was built with worker housing and operated under a (for its time) progressive social model, providing school for children. Now the site is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of six in Scotland.

The mill was powered primarily by water power, but it did have a backup steam engine to keep the mill going when the water level was too low. The sign told me this steam engine capable of producing 250 horsepower, which works out to 186 kW, equivalent to a compact car or a modest generator by modern standards.

The steam engine was originally connected to the mills by a belt elevated above the feed canal, reaching into each level of the multi-story mill building. This was replaced by an elevated walkway that took me across the feed canal and the road in front of the mill into the #4 mill. On my visit the feed canal in front of the mills was overgrown with reeds and grasses, though it was clear in the opposite direction upriver of the still-standing mill buildings, opposite the site of the #5 mill that burned down during while the mill was in operation and had not been replaced.

The elevated walkway took me into the top level of the mill, where I found a ride to interpret the mill, comprised of self-propelled shells suspended from a track mounted to the ceiling that would spin to point me at whatever they wanted me to look at. The ride was narrated from the perspective of a ten-year-old girl who worked in the mill, scrambling under the spinning rigs in action to pick up scraps of fiber that had fallen from the machines, and rethreading yarn that had broken during the spinning process. The ride was not precisely targeted at me (and I also wondered what Julian would think of the ride, since it states that the spirits of people who worked in the mill are still here).

Then I stepped onto the spinning floor, with some of the spinning rigs set up, spinning several different colors of fiber into yarn.

This mill was a spinning mill, using the water power from the river to run the machines that drew fiber into thread. Static displays on the other side of the room talked about the source of the fiber (this mill mostly spun cotton fiber from the American south; the displays acknowledged that this was produced with slave labor but didn't dwell on it. While I was looking around the static displays a museum employee (wearing modern ear protection, a clear anachronism and an appropriate concession to modern health and safety) turned on the spinning rig so I got to see it in action. It moved fast enough that it was hard to follow what was happening but I cross-referenced what I was seeing with the old video playing on a tv above the fence separating the museum guests from the industrial machinery and figured out that it combined the two motions necessary to spin fiber into thread: the twisting of the fibers to bind them together, and also the drawing of the bundle of fibers out into a long thin thread. It used a long row of scores of rounded spinning needles instead of a sharp spinning needle, possibly to forestall an industrial scale Sleeping Beauty scenario, and the whole rig moved backwards and forwards as the spindle twisted around and the guides maintained the correct tension in the thread and looped it onto the correct position on the take-up spool. It was a marvel of eighteenth century engineering, originally powered directly by water (but now powered by an electric motor, which the signs told us were powered by generators running from the same river).

Here's a short video I took on my phone illustrating one whole cycle of the spinning rig. With just one row of spinning rigs running at once in the stone-walled factory floor the noise was loud enough to border on unpleasant. An entire floor full of machines running 24/7 would have been deafening.

Further down the row of equipment were two different machines to thread multiple strands into thread suitable to be woven, and another machine respinning thread from one spool to another.

I left the spinning floor and followed the self-guided tour route up a different flight of stairs to see a wedding venue displayed in the attic, then stepped out onto a roof garden overlooking the mill town. The mist had subsided, leaving wet clouds that hung heavily in the sky and left every surface wet.

On my way down I saw the obligatory gift shop and cafe. It was just before noon on a gloomy Thursday and the cafe was just getting going serving the trickle of people visiting the mill. The gift shop sold yarn for knitting that they had spun on site in their factory, but I don't think I know anyone who needs special yarn referencing a specific chapter of Scottish industrial history. I did not see any books or other materials that would help me understand the mill and its historical and industrial (and cultural, and political) context and significance, which seemed like a missed opportunity because I probably would have bought one or more books if I had seen them.

On the way out I got a good look at the steel frame of the mill building. The museum had removed the floors in one section to produce a helical ramp descending the floors of the mill building; it was only when I got to the bottom that I really got a good angle on the frame to illustrate how the stone exterior of the building has only a modest role in supporting the factory floors inside.

I stepped out of the mill building into the not-quite-rain outside and looked at the undershot water wheel in the foundation at the site of mill #5. All of the mills had these water wheels in their foundations, leveraging the drop in water from the feed canal above the mills down to the river below, providing the power necessary to run all of the machinery in the mill.

I dropped by the building containing an old school room, which was set up as a large hall with benches facing the front; and also an exhibit presenting findings from the worker housing buildings, which have been continuously inhabited for more than 200 years, and remain in use today.

I headed out of New Lanark to walk back up the hill to Lanark and catch the next hourly train back to Glasgow, having seen interesting things in Scottish industrial history.

When I arrived in Glasgow it was almost 14:00 and I hadn't yet eaten lunch. I dropped by a fish-and-chips shop around the corner from the station which advertised a vegan fried sausage, which I figured was a close-enough substitute that I should give it a try. It's not my preferred comfort food but I figured it was culturally significant.

I caught the subway clockwise to Govan and walked to Govan Old Church.

The church is an interesting smaller church on its own, with the footnote that Govan was a more-important town before upstart Glasgow showed up and usurped the position that Govan believes ought to be rightfully theirs. But what really makes Govan Old Church interesting are the Govan Stones, which appear to be burial stones from the first millennium of the common era, a time from which few written records survive. Archeological and historical evidence suggests that there was a Christian church on this site at the time, and the stones are presumably burial markers from the church yard. But basically everything we think we know about the stones is innuendo and speculation so maybe they were something else entirely. All we know for sure is that they're old.

One of the artifacts on display appears to be a sandstone sarcophagus. It was was found in the church yard in the nineteenth century while digging a grave and seems to depict a person on a horse, and some iconography that could be interpreted as early Christian on one side and Norse on the other side, which suggests that it comes from the period when Vikings were expanding into Scotland, and maybe suggests the intent was to hedge bets between two different religious traditions.

The whole thing was an interesting experience, seeing a bunch of very old (and poorly-understood) monuments in a (not quite as old, but still nice) church.

Around the corner from Govan Old Church was another industrial history site I wanted to visit, Fairfield Heritage, dedicated to shipbuilding on the Clyde, on the edge of a site where BAE Systems still builds ships today. But the site closed at 16:00, and I was running out of time (and I got turned around leaving the church and got waylaid by an apparently-drunk Scottish guy who I could barely understand sitting on the steps outside the church drinking a can of lager, then ended up on a dead-end path along the river Clyde while I was trying to escape). But I figured I'd regret not going at all, so I showed up fifteen minutes before closing and got one of the docents to infodump on me. I saw two things (a model of a marine steam engine, and a large photo of workers and spectators standing on a ship building frame watching a launch, without any effort towards health and safety), and it was all I could hope for given the time.

I still had an hour in which I could have showed up to one of the big museums around the university and seen a couple of things, but I decided I didn't need to show up late again so I took the subway to Patrick and got coffee and a baked good for a leisurely snack.

For supper I ate at a tiny restaurant around the corner from Glasgow Central serving Mission-style burritos with vegan haggis. This seemed like a sufficiently-interesting fusion food that I needed to try it. I'm not sure I really tasted the vegan haggis specifically in the explosion of flavors in the Mission burrito (with beans, rice, salsa, guacamole, and jalapeños) but I think it contributed to the noticeable crunch from the oats in the dish.

My guidebooks told me that Glasgow has a live music scene and that King Tut's Wah Wah Hut was one of the best venues in town, so I found an interesting-sounding band I'd never heard of before (Carsick Charlie) and headed to their show in the evening. The steps leading up to the performance space were printed with years and bands that had performed there, some of which I recognized (and at least one of which, Frank Turner, I saw earlier this year in San Francisco). By the time the steps climbed to 2020, around the corner, they had a couple of credible-sounding bands and then referenced the NHS and staying apart, together and the rest of the pandemic year.

It turned out that I actually ended up liking one of the opening bands, Virginia Coast, more than the headliner; but I still had a good time seeing live music at the show.

I took more pictures at New Lanark at Photos on 2024-08-15.