Milling around in times past

To Etherow Country Park at Compstall, Stockport, this month, to explore a beauty spot which, like so many, has been shaped by industry

When Compstall Mill produced its first yard of calico in June 1824, the village that bore its name was a mere smattering of farms and cottages.

George Andrew, the man who harnessed the power of the River Etherow to drive his mill also went on to create a village to house his workers. Having given them homes and jobs, the Andrew family would even, in paternalistic style, let those villagers know when it was bedtime, with a blunderbuss fired from the roof of the mill at 10 pm.

A massive weir – still to be seen today – was erected to regulate the water, which would drive an immense water wheel dubbed Lily, and reputed to have the same capacity as the famous Laxey wheel on the Isle of Man.

The mill was still going strong more than 120 years later when a feature in the Calico Printers’ Association magazine in 1951 told how Compstall Mill was possibly the only cotton mill in Britain still powered by water – hydro-electric turbines rather a water wheel by this time.

In vainglorious style, that feature told of Compstall’s high-grade poplins being exported to Canada and the USA and trumpeted about how those in the British textile industry “have a vital part to play in Britain’s present and future.”