SIX YEARS before a water turbine began generating electricity which allowed Queen Victoria to turn on lights in Balmoral Castle one was producing power in a remote corner of the Yorkshire Dales.
Brian Dooks
It was 1882 when the Williamson Double Vortex water turbine, now the world's oldest working example, replaced a waterwheel at Gayle Mill, near Hawes, in a building now said to be the oldest unaltered cotton mill in existence.
It was built in about 1
776 by Oswald and Thomas Routh to use machinery designed by Richard Arkwright.
Gayle Mill won the North of England regional heat of the BBC 2 programmer Restoration, but failed to take the £3m national prize. However, the publicity raised its profile so much that the first phase of its restoration as one of the gems of Britain's industrial heritage is now complete.
The Grade II* listed building has been re-roofed, its gable end stabilised and its windows repaired.
Shrouded in scaffolding and plastic sheeting, it still looks in need of much loving care but that is now guaranteed thanks to £875,000 from a variety of sources, including £585,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and a dedicated team assembled by the North of England Civic Trust.
The aim is to restore the building so that it can be used as a training centre for the timber industry and also to provide some public access in 2006 for groups to see how little it has changed in nearly 230 years.
The Double Vortex turbine, designed by Professor James Thomson, of Queen's College, Belfast, was built by Williamson Bros, of Kendal, and has returned to the same workshops to be refurbished by Gilbert Jilkes and Gordon, which supplied similar equipment to Queen Victoria.
After spinning cotton for only 30 years, the Mill spun flax for a short time. For much of the 19th century it spun wool for the local hand knitting industry. In 1878 it became a sawmill and water from Gayle Beck drove its turbine until 1988.
By then its previous owner Brian Alderson, one of the people behind its restoration, faced buying modern equipment to meet safety standards or moving his business to a smaller workshop where power depended on the drop of a switch rather than the height of the water in the beck.
When Richmond MP William Hague visited the site on Saturday, the restoration group's chairman, Alec Dinsdale, said it was eight years since the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority had asked for the Civic Trust's help to save the mill,, then on the buildings at risk register "It's been a long slog but at the end of the day it will be worth it."
Details of the Friends of Gayle Mill are available from Roger Emmins at Ella Farmhouse, Appersett, Hawes, DL83LN.
brian.dooks@ypn.co.uk
