Disused Water-wheel, Lumb Mill, Wainstalls, near Halifax

Gelatine silver print entitled 'Disused Water-wheel, Lumb Mill, Wainstalls, near Halifax' by Ian Beesley. Produced for the commission `Through the Mill:, The Story of Yorkshire Wool in Photographs'. 1985-1987'.

Once Yorkshire manufacturers had decided to turn away from domestic production and increase their output of woollen yarn by harnessing the new machines to a new source of power, they looked to the water courses in the deans and cloughs of the Pennine hills. Consequently the first factory system was very much a part of the countryside and only with the coming of steam was factory production associated with intensive urbanisation. This surviving cast iron drive wheel (36 feet diameter) belong to the Lumb Mill water-wheel at Wainstalls, high in the Calder Valley where seven other similar mills were all owned by the Calvert family. Erected in 1803 it was the mill's sole source of power until electrification in 1953.