The door at the long end of the mill is propped open with a slate, and you step in onto floorboards worn pale by a century of soft tread. The looms are working at the far wall, four of them in a row, their shuttles moving back and forth with a steady wooden clack that fills the high room without crowding it. Late October light comes through the tall windows in slow slabs, the colour of clover honey, and lays itself across the racks of bobbins so that the pale yarn seems lit from within. The smell reaches you first as warmth, then as lanolin, then as the faint hot iron of the machines. You walk slowly down the central aisle, hands at your sides.
The floor under your boots is oiled pine, dark at the knots, paler along the grain where shoes have passed for generations. Here and there a board has been replaced and the new wood sits a shade lighter, fitting itself into the older colour year by year. You pass the first loom and stop a moment to watch the shuttle travel. It crosses the warp left to right, then right to left, drawing its thread behind it like a slow needle, and the reed comes forward and tamps the weft into the cloth with a small definite sound. The cloth gathers itself onto the front beam in a thickening fold, oatmeal-coloured, faintly flecked with brown. Above the loom, a leather belt runs to the line shaft along the ceiling, turning unhurriedly, polished by its own movement.
Further on, the racks rise to shoulder height on either side of you, fitted with wooden pegs, and on each peg a bobbin of yarn stands ready. The yarns are undyed, the colours of the sheep themselves: the soft cream of a Romney fleece, the warm grey of a Shetland, the deeper grey of a Hebridean clip, a brown so dark it reads almost black until the honey light finds it. You let your fingers brush along the ends of the bobbins as you walk, the way a child runs a stick along a fence, and the yarn is cool and slightly oily under your fingertips, the lanolin not yet washed out of it. Where the light catches a bobbin full-on, the individual fibres show, each one a separate filament of fleece spun true.
The sound of the mill arranges itself around you as you move deeper into the room. The looms keep their four-beat rhythm, not quite together, slightly off from one another like four clocks in the same hall. Underneath that, the line shaft hums on its bearings, a low even note that you feel in the soles of your boots as much as hear. Somewhere out of sight a carding machine turns, slower, with a softer brushed sound, and from the yard outside comes the occasional thin call of a jackdaw on the mill roof. A pigeon shifts in the rafters and resettles. The shuttles go on, their wooden bodies clapping into the boxes at each end of the loom, and the cloth grows on the beam by the width of a thread, and another, and another.
In the far corner a weaver in a brown canvas apron is threading a loom that stands silent. She works without looking up, her hands moving between the heddles with the small precise motions of long practice, drawing each warp thread through its own wire eye and then through the reed beyond. The threads come down from the back beam in a pale curtain, hundreds of them, and she takes them in the order they hang, one and one and one. There is a stool beside her with a tin mug on it, and a pair of reading glasses folded on a folded cloth. The light from the window behind her catches the loose hairs at her temple and turns them the same honey as the yarn. You watch for a while from the aisle, and she does not look up, and you walk on.
The air thickens with smell as you reach the middle of the room, where a stove sits set into the wall on a slab of blue slate. It is a small black iron stove with a kettle on its top, and the kettle is not boiling but is warm, sending up a thread of steam that lifts and breaks against the rafters. The smell of the wool is strongest here, mixed with the dry smell of the stove and with something fainter underneath, oil from the machine bearings, dust from the carding room, the faintest trace of woodsmoke from the chimney that climbs the wall and disappears through the slate roof. You stand by the stove for a moment with your hands held out near it, not quite touching, feeling the warmth come up into your palms. The iron has been black-leaded so often that it shines with a soft grey sheen, and the door catch is worn bright where thumbs have lifted it.
Beyond the stove the floor changes, the boards giving way to flagstones laid in an uneven pattern, each stone dished slightly in the centre where feet have crossed and crossed again. Here the finished cloth is stacked on a long table of scrubbed deal, bolts of it wrapped in brown paper and tied with jute string. You walk along the edge of the table, and the cloth under the paper has a soft give to it, the springiness of new weave. At the table's end, an unwrapped bolt has been left out for inspection, and you can see the weave close-to: a herringbone in two greys, the lines running diagonal and then diagonal the other way, the pattern so regular that the eye slides along it as along a stream. A pair of iron shears lies beside it, the handles bound in leather darkened by use.
The light has shifted while you stood there. It is past four now, and the slabs of honey through the high windows have moved down the wall and onto the floor, leaning longer, and the colour in them has deepened toward amber. The looms go on at the far end. The weaver in the corner has finished a section of threading and stands back, her hands hanging at her sides, looking at her work, and then she leans in again. The shuttle of the working loom nearest you crosses, and crosses, and the reed beats, and a fresh inch of cloth is added to the beam without anyone needing to mark it. A cat the colour of the Shetland grey comes out from behind a basket of carded rovings, walks two steps, sits down, and begins to wash one shoulder.
You turn and walk back the way you came, more slowly this time, the light at your back now and your own long shadow falling ahead of you down the aisle. The bobbins on their pegs go past at the edge of your vision, cream, grey, darker grey, brown, cream again, the pattern of them like the pattern of fields seen from a hill. You pass the stove, and the warmth of it reaches after you for a step or two and then lets you go. The smell of lanolin stays in your clothes. The clack of the looms behind you arranges itself again into its four overlapping beats, no longer the centre of the sound but its edge.
At the door you stop and turn. The room from here is a long warm corridor of yarn and light, the looms at the far end small with distance, the weaver in the corner a brown shape bent over her threads, the steam from the kettle still lifting in its thin pale line and breaking against the beams. The honey light has crossed the floor and reached the foot of the racks on the eastern side, and is climbing them slowly, peg by peg, turning each bobbin amber as it passes. Outside, a soft cold has begun to come down with the lowering of the sun, and the slate beyond the threshold has gone the colour of wet pewter. The clack of the looms keeps on at its old patient rate, neither faster nor slower than when you came in, and the line shaft turns on overhead, and somewhere in the rafters the pigeon shifts again, and the light goes on its slow way down the wall