The Brontes and the Moors (or is that "The Moops"--sorry, Seinfeld joke)

On the drive to the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth,Yorkshire, we passed this lovely old viaduct.

My obsession with stone walls again.  But this one is a dry stone wall -- we hadn't seen one of those up close before!  (This is actually at the Bronte Parsonage where the Bronte sisters--Charlotte, Emily, and Anne--grew up.)

From the Brontes' back yard, the view of the moors.  They were looking particularly lush and homey this day, not the bleak windswept moors of, say, Wuthering Heights.

This is the view from the Brontes' front yard.  It may explain some of the tone of their stories.  (The parsonage is quite close to the church, naturally, but there's a cemetery between them.)

The Parsonage, now a museum.

The village-scape in downtown Haworth.  Behind me is a very fine chippie, where I got the best fish-and-chips I've had all trip.

More moors.

It was late in the day after our drive to Bronte-land.  But this would be our only opportunity to visit one of the old textile mills in the district, so we detoured to Masson Mills in Derbyshire on the way home. Most of the old building has now been repurposed, but there are remnants of the old mill on one of the floors, and some working looms from the early 19th century.  Because we were such a large group, we got a private demonstration, even though we showed up unannounced an hour before closing.  (I think we may have been the most visitors the mill had enjoyed all week!)

 This loom predates Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, an iconic 19th-century novel about the Industrial Revolution and the textile industry.  Nobody knows exactly how old it is, but it was purchased second-hand by this mill in 1867, and still works.  The looms were LOUD!  Our guide had three working at one time, and it was deafening.  In the mid-19th century there would have been 100 looms working in a room at the same time.

The "Devil."  This machine was good for getting seeds and junk out of the raw cotton, but had a tendency to catch on fire spontanously and chew off the workers' limbs.

Can't remember the name of this machine, but it twists the cotton into yarn.  Whatever it's called, it's the longest in the country.

Jacquard looms used punch-cards for the pattern.  (You can see part of a jacquard loom behind the 1867 loom above--its' the one in the background with lots of yellow threads going up the ceiling.)  There can be up to 3000 separate strings on a jacquard loom, and if you threaded one of them incorrectly the whole fabric was ruined.  That guy had a high-stress job!

Punch cards for jacquard looms were the inspiration for computer punch cards in the mid-20th century.  In fact, looms were really the first computers!

Here C tinkers with an old punch card maker.

Part of the mill that's still functioning today.  (By the way, you can buy fabric here woven on the old looms.)

 That's a lot of bobbins.

The Derwent River runs behind the mill, and used to be the power supply for it.  (The water wheel was replaced with steam in the 19th century, but most mills in the north of England were originally built on rivers for the free power.)