New Mills
New Mills is a town in the Borough of High Peak, Derbyshire, England, south-east of Stockport and from Manchester at the confluence of the River Goyt and Sett. It is close to the border with Cheshire and above the Torrs, a deep gorge cut through carboniferous sandstone, on the north-western edge of the Peak District National Park.
New Mills has a population of approximately 12,000, in a civil parish which includes the villages and hamlets of Whitle, Thornsett, Hague Bar, Rowarth, Brookbottom, Gowhole and Birch Vale.
New Mills was first noted for coal mining, then for cotton spinning, bleaching and calico printing. It was served by the Peak Forest Canal, three railway lines and the A6 trunk road. Redundant mills were bought up in the mid-twentieth century by sweet manufacturer Swizzels Matlow. New Mills was a stronghold of Methodism.
New Mills is twinned with Alsfeld, Germany, and a road is named in honour of its twin town called Alsfeld Way.
History
New Mills is in the area formerly known as Bowden Middlecale, which was a grouping of ten hamlets. The name of New Mylne was given to it from a corn-mill, erected in 1391, near to the present Salem Mill on the River Sett in the hamlet of Ollersett. This was adjacent to a convenient bridge over the Sett. By the late 16th century, the name was applied to the group of houses that grew up round it. Coal mining was the first industry of the area, with up to 40 small pits and mines exploiting the Yard Seam. The climate, good construction stone and the availability of stable land by fast-flowing water was ideal for cotton spinning. Cotton mills and print-works were built in the Torrs Gorge from 1788. Dwellings were built on the sides of the gorge, sometimes with one home built on top of another, both being entered at their respective street levels. Examples still exist on Station Road and Meal Street.By 1810, New Mills had nine cotton mills, plus three weaving mills and at least three printworks.
Pigot's Directory 1835 describes New Mills:
A second group of 'later' mills formed by the newly opened Peak Forest Canal in Newtown, a hamlet away on the other side of the Goyt in what was then the parish of Disley in Cheshire. Increasingly these mills and houses merged into New Mills. The soft iron-free water was suitable for bleaching and finishing and printing. With the advent of steam, and the growth of the canal network to transport raw cotton, coal and the finished product, bigger mills were built and the smaller isolated rural mills were no longer competitive. By 1846, most of New Mills' mills had stopped spinning. The small mills moved out of cotton; the larger mills along the canal moved into finishing. Torr Vale Mill had added a weaving shed in 1836, and moved into producing towelling.
The commercial method of calico printing using engraved rollers was invented in 1821 in New Mills. John Potts of Potts, Oliver and Potts used a copper-engraved master to produce rollers to transfer the inks.
Before the construction of the high-level bridges the Torrs was a major obstacle; traffic had to descend to cross the Goyt and then climb the same height on the other bank. The first bridge to be constructed was the Queens Bridge on Church Road. The Union Road bridge was built in 1884; obtaining the land was difficult, as the arches needed to pass close to Torr Mill and properties on the Cheshire bank, and Torr Top Hall had to be demolished. The new road was named after the 'union' of the two halves of the town. The first station in New Mills was at Newtown, on the Stockport, Disley and Whaley Bridge Railway; this opened on 9 June 1855. This followed the line of the Peak Forest Canal staying safely away from the Torrs. The Sheffield and Midland Railway Companies' Committee company built two viaducts across the Goyt: one for a line to New Mills Central that opened in 1864, and one for the fast line through the Disley Tunnel which opened in 1904.
Cotton continued to be worked at Torr Vale Mill until 2000, giving the mill over two hundred years of service.
In the great storm of June 1872, Grove Mill and Torr Vale weir were destroyed; at Rock Mill, then being used to make paper, two blocks of buildings and considerable stock and some machinery were lost, but the only fatalities were two cows.
The River Goyt at about two o'clock a.m. on Wednesday was from 12ft to 14ft above its usual height...At New Mills, where the Goyt is joined by the River Kinder, extensive damage was done to property. The paper works of Messrs. Schlosser and Co. were damaged upwards of £1,500 as two blocks of buildings were completely washed away – one portion contained a large quantity of paper. The works of Mr. W.S. Lowe also sufferd severely, the damage being estimated at £300. Two strong stone weirs were washed away and two bridges; many acres of land were flooded. – Manchester Times
This was minor compared with events at Whaley Bridge, where Toddbrook Reservoir was overtopped and another reservoir known as Adsheads Pools breached completely, the waters sweeping through the centre of the village of Hurdsfield. The June 1930 flood was more serious for New Mills. Heavy rain over the area culminating in a cloudburst over Rowarth caused the River Sett to rise rapidly by up to. Many properties on Brookside were flooded and destroyed and one rescuer was drowned. Hyde Bank Road was engulfed and buildings collapsed at Arnfield's foundry. At Rowarth, the remains of the Little Mill and the landlord of the Little Mill Inn were swept away. At Watford Bridge the river took away part of the printworks, and at Bate Mill gouged a new channel taking with it the sewage plant, 250 tons of coal, most of the road and the gas main. At Birch Vale, the problem was caused by the waters cascading down from Lantern Pike; the culvert being inadequate, the roadways became rivers washing away sections of walling. Much livestock perished.
A model of the town under construction in 1884 can be found in New Mills Heritage and Information Centre, which is run and managed by volunteers and funded and managed by New Mills Town Council.
Government
Now almost entirely in Derbyshire, New Mills straddled the historic county boundaries of Derbyshire and Cheshire. The traditional boundary was the River Goyt: Low Leighton, Torr Top and Hide Bank were always in Derbyshire, but Torr Vale Road and all of Newtown were in Cheshire. Today, all the housing to the west of the traffic lights on the A6 remains in the civil parish of Disley in Cheshire.The area was part of the Royal Forest of the Peak which passed into the hands of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1372. The ten hamlets, in three groups:
- Great Hamlet, Phoside and Kinder;
- Beard, Ollersett, Thornsett and Whitle;
- Chinley, Bugsworth and Brownside
Jon Pearce, a Labour Party member, is the member of parliament for the High Peak constituency.
Geography
New Mills is approximately NNW of London and south-east of Stockport. It borders on Disley, in Cheshire, and Marple, in the Stockport Metropolitan Borough in Greater Manchester. The town is on the north-western edge of the Peak District, but only the eastern part of the parish is within the official boundaries of the National Park. The town includes the hamlets of Thornsett, Hague Bar, Rowarth, Brookbottom, Gowhole, and most of Birch Vale. Various parts of the town are given local names: Eaves Knoll ; High Lee ; Hidebank ; Low Leighton ; and Torr Top.At its lowest point the parish is about above sea level, but the valley sides rise to at the highest points above Rowarth. The watercourses to the north, particularly the Rowarth Brook, drain the southward slopes of Mellor Moor, Cown Edge and Lantern Pike. The Sett and its tributary the Kinder drain much of the plateau of Kinder Scout; the Sett flows through Hayfield before passing through Birch Vale to the Torrs and the River Goyt. The Goyt rises on the moors of Axe Edge, near the River Dane and the Cat and Fiddle Inn between Buxton and Macclesfield. It passes through Whaley Bridge, where it is joined by the Todd Brook and the Black Brook from Chapel-en-le-Frith. The sides of the Goyt valley have been used to carry two railway lines, the Peak Forest Canal and the A6 trunk road from London to Carlisle via Manchester; these all pass through New Mills.
Geologically speaking, New Mills lies in the north–south-orientated syncline known as the Goyt Trough. The base rocks are from the Carboniferous period, with underlying Namurian gritstone sandstones, from 333 M a.to 313 M a. Above there are coal measures present. This was folded in the Variscan orogeny into the Goyt Trough syncline. Coal has been mined at over 30 locations in the area, including Pingot Pit. There are three narrow seams of coal present: the Red Ash, Little Mine and the Yard Seam. The Yard Coal is so named because that is the average thickness of the seam; it is the lowest seam and rests on Woodhead Hill Sandstone. In these seams lead ore has also been extracted. Beardmoor Colliery, Ollersett or Burnt Edge Colliery and Lee or New Mills Colliery all worked the seam. of coal weighs about half an imperial ton, and the Yard Seam would produce 4,500 tons per acre. Bigrave Edge or Broadmoor Edge Colliery worked the Red Ash seam, which was only thick.
The syncline was buried in younger rocks of the Tertiary Period. These were eroded, not least by the scouring of the ice age ice sheets and the pressures of the meltwaters when temperatures rose. New Mills was on the margins of glaciation, and the meltwaters sought additional routes under the ice for run off. They exploited faults and crevices in the underlying rock. In the Torrs Gorge, the Rivers Goyt and Sett cut a new channel into the strata of the Woodhead Hill Sandstone which forms the centre of New Mills. A mantle of glacial sediment, principally gravels, covered the whole of the braided valleys. In the Pleistocene period, of 12.9 k a to 11.6 k a, the rivers re-formed into single channels, and meanders were formed. These became very distorted above the constrictions of the gorges. Down cutting occurred, exposing previous layers, creating terraces that were covered with silty clay alluvium.