Where there’s a mill...
Knockando Woolmill has been operating since the French Revolution. Now, thanks to some determined volunteers, it will at last be restored to its former glory, says Brian Donaldson. Photographs by Ed Alcock
Back in 2004, Knockando Woolmill was in the running for the biggest prize in reality television, heritage style. Griff Rhys Jones and the BBC Restoration team travelled to the Highlands district mill, to film the winner of the Scottish heat. Unfortunately, winter conditions were not to work in the 220-year-old mill’s favour that day. Griff was on charming form, showing genuine interest in the sepia-tinged history and current workings of the mill. But fellow presenters Ptolemy Dean and Marianne Suhr weren’t quite so smitten.
“The first thing Marianne did was fall over in the snow, squash her nose and get taken to hospital,” recalls Hugh Jones, the mill’s weaver since the Seventies. “We lost half a day there and I don’t think she was that enamoured of the place.”
In the end, Knockando (pronounced “Knock-Ann-Doe” and not, as some wags will insist, “No-Can-Do”) was edged out in the final by a group of late medieval buildings in Birmingham. The show’s “winner-takes-all” policy meant that none of the other finalists was awarded a penny. This left Knockando, Britain’s oldest working district (as opposed to industrial) tweed mill in a perilous position and the Trust, set up to save it from dereliction, looking elsewhere for funds.
At present all that’s left of the once proud mill on the banks of the River Spey is a ramshackle collection of buildings, roofed with patched corrugated iron and close to tumbling down. These house a number of very old looms, which still run today. Five years on, the Trust has finally raised enough to start restoration. Its aim, says chairman Jana Hutt, is to repair the leaking buildings and set it up both as a working mill and a visitor centre.
The history of Knockando Woolmill stretches back to the 1780s when it was listed in parish records as the “Wauk Mill”. At the heart of the local community, it grew gradually while Britain’s textile industry gathered apace with William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” springing up in the North of England and the Scottish Borders. There’s a solid family aspect to the story behind the mill, as evidenced in the Knockando motto, “Weaving Generations Together”. The Grants, the Frasers, the Smiths and latterly the Stewarts kept the mill afloat by fending off the Depression of the Thirties and the elements of a Scottish winter: the mill was flooded in 1947, with production carried out in the open air until the building had dried out.
By that point, many district mills had gone out of business but Knockando broke the mould and continued to thrive, a fact which Hugh Jones puts down to one thing. “The last owner, Duncan Stewart, was born in 1895, and stayed in the business with his aunt Winnie, who was quite a determined lady. They had their small farm and the modern world didn’t wash over them too much; they just carried on with what they were doing. Because of particular people and a particular family, this place survived.”
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