Key

J: = Interviewer, Julia
P: = Participant, Tony Greenwood
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[5:22 IA] = inaudible section at this time
word = best guess at word
- = interruption
… = trailing off or change of thought, mid-sentence

J:Tony, you’re an industrial heritage team guide.

TG:Yes.

J:Can you yell me a little bit about that role at Acorn Bank?

TG:It was advertised as a role, so I show people round the Mill, and that was volunteering for the Trust that runs the Mill, and shared with that, it’s a shared role, is volunteering for the National Trust to show people round the industrial heritage on the site. Because I’ve only got limited time at the moment, I’ve not quite retired yet, I’m trying to, I’ve ended up not doing the Mill yet, so I’m just doing the tour guides for now.

J:How long have you been doing it?

TG:I think possibly a bit less than a year. I started, say nine months.

J:Have you got a background in that area? How has your interest gravitated you towards that?

TG:I’ve got quite a mixed background. I used to live next door to an archaeologist in St. Helens and he was very interested in the industrial archaeology of St. Helens, which is enormous, so I picked up his enthusiasm really, and since then I’ve dabbled in archaeology of various kinds and local history. And when I thought I’d retired, I did a local history course at Lancaster Uni, which was fascinating, so that got me back up to speed really. So I’m doing this to make sure I don’t forget what I did at Lancaster.

J:Can you tell me about where your tour takes you around the site?

TG:Yes, when people arrive they arrive at the shepherds hut, which is the entrance to the site for the visitors, and then I walk around the back of the house, depending on if they’re bouncy people and they don’t mind where we wander off to, I look round the back of the house, because there’s some interesting bits there. And then we go, from there we go all the way down through the woods, along a path, not actually in the woods, but along a path, past where the Egyptian mine, well it still is, I think, where it was, and then we go down to the quarries, back up again, down to the end where the end of the site is, and there’s a big engine house there where there used to be an engine to take the jetsam away, and then we walk all the way back along the site, following, as much as we can, the sources of water for the mill. Then I abandon them at the mill and the millers take over.

J:So can you go back along that a little bit for me, talk a little bit more about it.

TG:Firstly, the most obvious thing, which is the first part of the house you see has enormous foundations, they stick right out into the path. And some people say that that is definite evidence there was a Peel tower here. Others say that it can’t be a Peel tower because nobody in their right mind would demolish a Peel tower, because even today that’s a massive thing to do, so it would still be there if it ever had been. I’ve read archaeologists saying that all that’s there is what you can see, there’s nothing else so it can’t be because there would be other evidence there as well. And then separately from that, I’ve read up a bit on Peel towers and quite a lot of them are not real, and they were built as vanity projects by Victorians and things. So my suspicion is that it was deliberately made to look as if it had been a Peel tower, so they’d get all the glory of having had one without the hassle of building one. I don't know what the truth is but it gets the discussion going because I want the people to talk to me as much as I talk to them, and people are quite happy to speculate and some are very clear in their minds that it’s obvious that that’s the way sandstone foundations are built, and because it’s sandstone, that’s the right way to do it. So we don’t know.

J:And why do you think these particular sites, it’s been lived in for a lot of years, hundreds of years, why do you think they picked this particular site?

TG:It’s very slightly elevated which I don't know if, well it’s very obvious if you look out the window but it’s not obvious otherwise. If you look on a contour map it is slightly off the ground. It’s a long, thin kind of shape, slight mound that it’s on. It’s got a good water supply from the beck. Well, carrying on past the house, before I forget, if the people are talking a lot I take them to look at the outside of the windows where somebody scratched with their diamond ring on the glass, so we look at that from the outside. I think it was done from the inside but you can see it from the outside, I think, more clearly, so we look at that. And there’s a mouse man door, there’s a number of oak doors on the property and one of them has a mouse carved in it. Dorothy Ratcliffe, who lived here, ordered, I think it was four doors from the business, and most of them, I think, are his but they’re plain, but this one has the mouse on it.

J:And then where do you go next from the …?

TG:Right, so then we set off, we go along the outside of the walled garden, straight along there, and we just keep going, so we go past the iron gates into the garden, there’s a couple of sets of them, and we look at them. It’s not part of the industrial heritage, that’s not a Ratcliffe innovation but talk about those. And if I can find it, which I never can, one of the biggest oak trees is along there on the left, but I only see it when I’m not looking for it, which is strange.

J:You’ll have to [05:21].

TG:Yes, I’ll put a big yellow mark on it or something. So we go along there and then you come to a, it used to be called the dog bench but now it’s just a pile of wood, so the bench has collapsed. If we stop there then that’s where the underground mines actually begin, so if there are kids I get them to jump up and down and see if it’s hollow. It’s 20 metres down so it isn't but I can pretend it is. And then we cut off down across the fields and there’s a path along the edge of a field, and from there you can see the subsidence where the land has sunk into the mines, you can look back at the house, you can imagine the view the house people had of the mines, which explains why there are some quite new trees, there’s a big screen of trees. I’d normally try and get them to, well I tell them that there’s debate about why the subsidence is there, because some people say it’s obviously subsidence from the mine, others say gypsum does that, it’s like limestone, it dissolves, so it’s a typical gypsum landscape, stop talking about the mines. And others say it was evidence of people looking for gypsum, so they were digging, trying to find the gypsum.

J:And what would gypsum have been used for back in the day, back in the day when the first mines were …

TG:I think mainly fertiliser, well, ground improvements because it was mixed in with things, and if you get the proportions right, apparently it’s really good for making the ground better. There are a few scandals of putting much too much gypsum in just to make it cheaper, but that was the idea. It was obviously used for plaster work and wax crayons, and polishing glass, which was their main customers here, so they were supplying the glassworks in St. Helen’s, which I lived there for a while so, ‘Oh yes, I know them,’ and there were some over in Newcastle area as well, they used to supply those.
We then go into what looks like an old woodland and then cut through, it is a bit of a cutting through, and you come to the bird hide, and then round the back of there you can see one of the, there’s two quarries there, there’s a pair of them, there’s a north one and a south one, and it must be the north one, so you can see that, and it’s a long, thin lake now going away from you, so we look at that.

J:So is that lake filled in, what was the quarry then?

TG:It’s just flooded quarry, yes. Which I don't think is very deep. One of the people that I showed round said it definitely is deep, but I was looking again at maps and things, looking at the contours, and if it’s 20 metres down, that’s about the surface of the water, so it can’t be that far down to get into the mine. But I don't know. If it’s a fit and able group and they’re wearing boots, I might go slightly into the woods and they can see then where the mine entrance would be under the water.

J:So the mine entrance is now under the water?

TG:Yes.

J:Oh, from the quarry?

TG:Yes, because the quarry was quarried out and when they finished that, then started mining in from the bottom of the quarry.

J:Oh, I see.

TG:So they tried that, and then there’s another quarry which is parallel to that one, and that one I don’t take people to. You could at this time of year but in the summer it’s nettles and all sorts and people wear shorts, and it looks the same, they’re twins pretty much.

J:And then you come to the river?

TG:Yes, we come back up again, so we come back up to the dog bench, and then from the dog bench, what I should have said was before we get to the dog bench, because you can hear the beck, and in particular the weir, I just point it out at that stage. And depending on the group, I say, ‘Are you local? Do you know the word beck?,’ and people do know the word beck, one person told me, ‘That’s not a beck. A beck is up in the fells and it’s got rocks and it’s going more quickly,’ so I have a map with me of the catchment and I say, ‘Well, here it is. We’re right at the very end of it, so we can call it a beck because it’s come down from right up on the fells.’

J:So where’s the head of the beck?

TG:There’s Knock Fell, which is kind of behind Knock Pike, and Cross Fell, so I point up there to people, I say, ‘Imagine the amount of water that’s coming down through there,’ and that’s where I come back to them later, what it’s done to the garden at the bottom. Because in flood, it’s enormous, the water that comes down.
Dorothy Ratcliffe always called it Crowdal and said that was the local pronunciation. I’ve asked the oldest locals I can find, nobody’s ever heard of that, and I looked in the dictionary of dialect place names and it’s not in there, so I strongly suspect she made it up because it fitted into her poem, because it’s only two syllables.

J:I see, yes, she wrote that poem and it’s lovely.

TG:It’s a lovely poem, yeah, yes, but I can’t find any other evidence that anybody think it’s called.

J:And so at that point you’re down in the sort of …?

TG:So we’re back down at the house level.

J:Yeah.

TG:And then we carry on, so we walk, and there’s not much to say now. There would be in the spring because if I knew about flowers, which I don’t, all the wild flowers that Ratcliffe planted, a lot of them are still there, apparently. So we carry on walking along, then we get to, so the mines I was talking about before were sort of 1900 ish, and by the 1920s they were too wet, the mines were too far in, so it was a long way to get the gypsum out, and apparently the gypsum was dipping down so it was getting even wetter, so they put a new entrance in up in the woods, and that’s the next thing we come to. So we walk along a bit further from the dog bench and then there’s the mine, and that’s got, somebody’s put in some really nice metal templates of people. British Gypsum gave us an old gypsum wagon that they use in the mine. There’s another one there which was pulled out of our mine, so that’s there, and there’s interpretation panels, so there’s lots to talk about there, so people do.
I saw a letter written by one of the Bowsmans to another Bowsman, saying that, ‘We’re going to have to start making an entrance in the woods because they’d got that distance from the quarry and it was too much effort to pull the gypsum out,’ so I think that’s what determined it. Because it is quite near the beck, they were able to use the water mill, supposedly, to power the mine.

J:So how would the wheel have worked that? Because they are renovating, aren’t they, the second wheel at the moment.

TG:Yes.

J:So how does that work, engineering wise?

TG:I don't know but the wheel would have turned somehow, a chain, and the chain would run on posts. They think it ran along the mill race, because that’s the obvious route, all the way to the mine.

J:Which is the other end of the …

TG:Yeah, it’s a long way to … Which is why people are sceptical of it. Apparently people that are restoring the mill can see how it was altered over time, and they now believe it’s true, but nobody’s found yet any evidence of the actual chain way.

J:You were saying earlier about how the beck has changed direction.

TG:Yes.

J:Can you tell me about that and why that’s happened?

TG:Yeah, so we go along to the engine house at the end, we talk about that, come back and then we go down, depending on the group, the quick way is quite steep so we do that normally, down to the weir. Not quite the weir, down to where the beck bends, so it comes off Henry’s estate onto Acorn Bank, round the corner, so we end up there. And then we walk along to where the weir is. And people sometimes ask then what the purpose of the weir is, which I never thought to question really, but why not. So I talk about it holding the water back, to get the water into the mill leat. Some people think there must have been a pond behind it, loads of people I’ve shown round say, ‘Surely there was a pond as well,’ and that’s when I say again, ‘There’s a lot of water coming down here. The chances of being out of water is very small.’ And then I show them where the leat goes, you can’t follow the leat easily. You can if you’re brace and it’s dry, but I can see where the beck goes down. We talk about the other weirs which are on the beck, which you can’t see unless you walk along it, I think they were for fishing. And then we carry on along down into the gardens, and then you cross over the mill race, and I point out that’s the mill race, it’s not the beck, and then you carry on to where the beck now, but in between, if you look at old maps compared with new maps, there’s quite a few different routes the beck has followed through the gardens.

J:So what’s changed the route of the beck?

TG:It’s the quantity of water smashing it up. I think it’s brute force really, I don't think it’s a gradual migration because there used to be, when we first lived here you could walk between the pond and the beck down to the mill and it made a nice circular route that you could do. You can’t do it anymore because it had bad floods one year. I don't know if it was Storm Desmond or before that even, and the beck moved quite a lot, so much so it’s threatening the pond. If it moves again that much it will move into the pond and the pond will be gone, so that will be sad.

J:One of the millers tell me that the beck’s quite feisty.

TG:Yes.

J:And is that because it’s dropping from such a great height down into where we are now? So when there is a lot of rain it’s …

TG:I think it’s just a huge catchment, isn't it, and the height of it, yeah, it’s come down a long way. It is a huge catchment.

J:And you were mentioning the other weirs. I didn’t know there were other weirs there. Tell me about them and why they …

TG:Yeah, there’s two more. If you climb over where the sluice is, if you go across there and walk a little bit further down, you can see one, and that one is quite obvious. It looks like concrete to an amateur, but apparently it is stone slabs which are there. I’ve never been close to it but from that distance it’s quite like coloured stone. Further down, round the back of the pond, if you just come very slightly off the path you can see the other one. Somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, one of the people I was showing round said ‘good afternoon’ to the fairies, and I thought, ‘Oh,’ because my wife’s grandmother lives on the Isle of Man, or did, and it’s a Manx tradition that if you’re crossing water you say hello to the fairies. And I hadn’t noticed that we’d crossed over any water, so she apologised, I said, ‘No, my wife’s grandmother is from the Isle of Man,’ and she said she was from the Isle of Man, but she was quite clear that there was a particular area that there probably were fairies in that area. And she was embarrassed that she was talking about it so I didn’t want to push it, but I was reassured that that was normal for me because whenever I go to the Isle of Man people talk to the fairies.

J:I’ve never heard that one before, that when you cross water you say …

TG:Yeah, there’s one in particular, there’s a fairy bridge in the Isle of Man and you drive it across it and it’s all brightly painted and everything else, maybe to stop people crashing into it, and everyone says, ‘Good afternoon, fairies, good morning, fairies.’ I get stories, somebody had been an engineer and he wanted to tell me about what it was like inside a gypsum mine that he’d been in, and that was interesting.

J:What did he say?

TG:About how unlike a coal mine it is, because he was saying he’d actually been in one of the local ones and he just drove into it in a Land Rover and …

J:Because they’re so big?

TG:Yeah, well they’re big and also they’re up pretty much at surface level, so …

J:What would it have been like to work in a gypsum mine here, the one down in the woods?

TG:Hard work. There weren't very many of them, I think the numbers were in single figures quite often.

J:In terms of people?

TG:Yeah, and for the quarries they weren't using a lot of explosive. For the 1920s mine they did, but for that one they didn’t, so it was just hacking it out and putting it into wagons.

J:So they had used explosives here?

TG:Yes, there’s an explosives shed near where the mine entrance is.

J:Do you think that altered the landscape at all down there?

TG:I don't know. Round the time this was being taken over by the National Trust I think there was a mine working quite nearby, and they were looking at, this might be quite recent actually, when the mine stopped, 1980s maybe, they were trying to persuade the gypsum to pay some money here to restore the greenhouse because of the massive explosions that were happening in the area, and they wondered if that was damaging the property. But you can’t now see the mine was there because it was an open caste mine that’s been completely landscaped.

J:The one near …?

TG:The most recently operating one that was near here. You did mention the pond being an old course of the beck, because what I did when I started doing the tours, I looked at old maps and put new maps on top of them and things, and I tracked myself on a GPS dong the walk, I’ve got a terrible memory, I thought, ‘Where have I been? I don't know,’ so I tracked myself, and I then put it on an old map and I was crossing the beck several times even though I hadn’t, so the beck was all over the place. But there was definitely one where the pond is and the beck was full on going that way, so the pond is in an old line of the beck, definitely. I walked a sensible route, I hope, through the woods, and then when I overlaid that on an old map, I could see the beck wobbling around. 100 years ago I’d have been getting quite wet because of the way the beck’s moved.