The little shop at the entrance to Stott Park Bobbin Mill was bright and welcoming and we were just in time to make up the numbers for a guided tour. Inside the mill the workshop floor was deep in wood shavings, the ancient machinery glistened with new oil, and above our heads the shafts, belts and wheels clattered busily. Leaning against a saw bench the guide, a volunteer from English Heritage, showed us the baskets of bobbin blanks and a desperately dangerous looking piece of machinery which drilled the holes, then a retired bobbin-maker demonstrated how the bobbins were finished on a lathe. Unlike any wood turning we had seen before, this was a sudden and dramatic process. As the sharp steel knife touched the spinning cylinder of birch, there was a sudden shriek of cutting timber, and a curving ribbon of wood flew into the air. Another touch of a different cutter, and the bobbin was complete. The Victorian machinery in the mill is kept in working order and having seen the wood being roughed out into blocks and the various stages involved in shaping, boring and drying, we were then ushered upstairs. The groups are kept small on account of the fragile upper floors, with dire warnings about where not to tread, and we tiptoed round the drums where the finished bobbins were polished with paraffin wax. Downstairs again there was a steam engine to admire, a working water turbine and we visited the drying room and the coppice barn. Stott Park Mill was built in 1835 by John Harrison, originally to provide bobbins and reels for the Lancashire cotton trade, though later the business expanded to make dozens of different sorts of bobbins, as well as a wide range of wooden handles. In its heyday up to 25 men and boys were employed, but the hours were long, the machinery dangerous and the large quantity of dust produced, a health hazard. The mill was powered by water from the nearby millpond whose water came from High Dam (Grizedale), up on the fellside. In time the wheel was superseded by a turbine and then a small steam engine was installed. When it finally closed in 1971, due to Scandinavian competition and the decline of the cotton industry, Stott Park was one of the last working bobbin mills in the Lake District. As such huge quantities of wood were needed, the mills were built near the raw material. There were many similar mills in the surrounding district, and the local woodland had been previously coppiced for charcoal burning, swill and hoop making. Coppicing goes back for centuries and although such woodland contains few, if any, mature trees, it does not destroy the woods. The natural life of a birch tree is little longer than a man's, but when the stools are repeatedly cut down and allowed to grow again, they will survive for hundreds of years. Oak, ash and sycamore were also used, though the bobbins were usually made of birch, and the open heather-clad hillside behind the mill was planted in the 1850s with both oak and birch to provide more timber for Stott Park Bobbin Mill.
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