Stott Park Bobbin Mill
The Stott Park Bobbin Mill is a working museum located on the shores of Lake Windermere in Cumbria. The mill is the only functioning bobbin mill in the Lake District. Begun in 1835, the mill produced millions, if not hundreds of millions, of bobbins for the Lancashire spinning and weaving industry. At its height, over 250 boys and men produced over a quarter of a million bobbins a WEEK. The mill is situated amidst the birch forest harvested to produce the bobbins through a practice called ‘coppicing’, which means repeatedly felling trees at the base and allowing them to regrow, in order to provide a sustainable supply of timber. Bobbins are produced at the mill today through the same methods as two hundred years ago at the height of the industry. It is possible to tour the factory and see Read more…
Medieval Welsh Armor
Whether or not Welsh wore armor into battle has come up today because a reader of my books reported an ‘error’ in Daughter of Time saying that her ‘reading of history says that the Welsh didn’t wear armor in the Middle Ages’. That simply isn’t true. They did. After I cooled down about the inherent prejudice that comment reflects, I decided a blog post was in order to address the matter. Basically, history is written by the victors, and the English were particularly good at propaganda at a very early point. King Edward I knew very well what he was doing when he plundered Welsh records, took Welsh iconography as his own, and put himself in the lineage of King Arthur (who was, without a doubt, Welsh). Depictions of Welsh people in the Middle Ages are few and far between, Read more…
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