Wanderung 21

Lands Ho! Scotland, England, Shetland, Iceland, Newfoundland

August - September 2009

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009: Picts and Stones, and The Mill on the Tay

Although there were many more things to see and do around Edinburgh, our overall goal was to make a big loop drive around Scotland to see as much of it as feasible in the two weeks we had available. So after a breakfast of cereal and scones, we checked out and once again drove across the Firth of Forth bridge (this time intentionally rather than accidentally) and continued North past Perth on the M9 motorway. As long as I had a four-lane, limited-access highway where I could safely cower in the slow-going leftmost lane, the driving was low stress.

Unfortunately, to get to Stallings Mills, our next historic site, we had to turn off the motorway onto two lane highways and byways, which immediately increased the stress level. Our Passat station wagon had a long enough wheelbase that the rear wheels tracked slightly inside the front wheels on sharp left-hand turns. Given the very narrow two-lane roads and the common Scottish practice of lining the side of the road with kerbs (American: curbs), when I rounded a corner very tightly the rear wheels would sometimes clip the kerb and bounce me over toward the oncoming traffic in the other lane, a distinctly unsettling experience. Given my druthers, I would have much preferred to be driving a smaller car but we had chosen the Passat wagon so that we could hopefully fit my two sisters and their luggage in the car with us. Oh well.

In any case, we arrived at Stanley Mills without incident and even backed safely into a nice, big parking space. It turned out that the old mill complex is being mostly converted into apartments and condominiums, but we finally found the one section that had been converted into a museum documenting 200 years of cotton mill production at that site on the River Tay.

The museum was housed in 4 levels in the oldest section of the mill. Some of the old machines were on exhibit including cotton carding machines, cotton tape making machines, and so forth, but other machines were represented simply by pictures or graphical displays in the appropriate places in the buildings. I had never realized that the mills of the early Industrial Revolution were carefully designed in four levels, with each level housing a distinct aspect or phase of producing the final cotton product.

For about two centuries the whole complex was powered by a water turbine housed at the lowest level and fed by the waters of the Tay. The original simple undershot water wheel was replaced by a wheel with cup-shaped containers and finally by a vertical turbine. To illustrate that development, one section of the museum had a big water tank with scale examples of the three types of water wheels. Visitors could manually open and close sluice gates to turn those scale models "on" or "off", and since the amount and pressure of the water was exactly the same for all three models, it was a great way to see how much more efficient each successive design of water wheel was in actual practice.

There was even a special flip-up gate that simulated "flood" conditions in the river, and by activating that you could immediately see how much each type of water wheel would be affected by spring floods. Gleefully experimenting with the "flood" option, I found out that both of the undershoot wheels were in fact stopped cold by flooding whereas the vertical turbine was not at all affected, showing its superiority. In reality, mill records indicated that after the installation of the vertical turbine the mill gained an extra 40 days of production each year during the period when the Tay was in flood. Besides allowing the visitors to have fun playing with water, that model was a great hands-on learning tool.


 

Similarly, the transmission of the power from the water wheel to the three upper stories of the mill by geared shafts and big cotton belts was also reproduced in a scale model that actually worked. Various levers allows us to tension or relax the belts and thus see exactly how the transmitted power affected the little scale spinning machines and so forth. So we ran around like madmen pulling and pushing the various levers to see exactly what result we would get. Such fun!

But the mill was hot, noisy and dangerous in many different ways. The average sound level around the heavy machinery was about 90 decibels, and prolonged exposure to that had the predictable affect of partial deafness for many of the workers. The unguarded machinery could kill or maim the women and children who operated and cleaned the equipment (engineers who repaired and maintained the equipment were male, but they were a minority of the employees). The ever-present cotton dust caused pulmonary disorders such as "brown lung disease" and was also a potential source of fire and explosions. In fact, the original mill burned down because of just such a fire. Although the replacement mill buildings were built to be fireproof structures, fires would still rip through the machines in the spinning room on an average of about once every two weeks even as late as the 1970s according to one engineer's eyewitness testimony.

However, the housing provided by the company was probably better housing than the farm crofts and the wages paid by the mill were probably more consistent and reliable than the wages available from farming, which would be the other main source of jobs in the local area. So although the working conditions were atrocious, I ended up having mixed feelings about whether the folks were better off working in the mill or being employed in some agricultural or pastoral setting.

After the mill we drove over to Meigle to see a small museum with Pict-carved stones. I let the GPS choose the route, and it choose the shortest, but almost certainly not the easiest, route. In fact, once we left Stanley Mills the roads we were routed on deteriorated from two full lanes with side markings, to two lanes but with only a center stripe, to a narrow paved road with no markings at all, and finally to a road so narrow that clearly you could not pass on it even though it was still carrying two-way traffic. On those roads they had "passing areas" located every few hundred feet, which were basically wide spots in the road where two cars could just barely squeeze by. I could have handled that with aplomb if the road had been even somewhat straight and level, but instead the road curved in and out and up and down so that I was constantly confronted with blind hills and blind corners on a one-lane road with two-way traffic. I resorted to the Ireland habit of honking my horn while approaching the crest of the hill or the apex of the curve, but I still didn't feel particularly safe even crawling slowly around them.

Nevertheless, we made it safely to Meigle and parked at the entrance to the church cemetery as I had read that the stones were found there. We didn't see any sign of them in the cemetery, but searching high and low we finally located the museum about 100 yards up the street. But by that time the museum staff person was out to lunch, so we walked around the corner to a nice cafe and had a nice relaxed luncheon while waiting for the museum to re-open. Once inside we saw one room filled with around 20 stones carved by the Picts somewhere from 500 A.D. to 800 A.D.. By 900 A.D., the Picts merged with the Scots and were lost as a distinct cultural group. The fact that the Picts might have been William Wallace's ancestors gave me a personal interest in their history, and mostly their history is known by the enduring evidence of their carved stones although the curator mentioned a Pict chieftain's burial site was currently being excavated by archaeologists.

The Pict stone carvings were, in fact, stunningly life like. I was informed that there are Class 1, 2, or 3 carved stones. Class 1 stones have purely pagan symbols carved on them and probably date from before the Christianizing of the Picts around 600 A.D. Class 2 stones have a Christian cross on one side and all pagan symbols carved on the other side. Those stones date from 600-800 or so, and the entire collection at Meigle are the Class 2 stones. Class 3 stones are pure Christian in carving on both sides of the stone, and I didn't see any of those at Meagle. Many of the carvings showed men riding horses, but others showed lions or wolves tearing apart a person, or bears, or other ferocious animals. I also saw elk (caribou) and cattle as well as what might have been dogs.


 

We were so intrigued by the carvings that when the curator told us the location of another three stones about 15 miles to the East, we made a detour out that way and finally found several other fine examples of Pictish stone carvings.


 


 

I was getting tired of driving by that point, so we headed West to try to find a place to stay for the night. We finally found a sign for a hotel in Alyth, a pretty little town on the Tay River upstream from Stanley Mills.

The hotel turned out to be right across the Tay River from the town square, which in this case had been turned into a small parking lot. It looked nice and we signed up for a room for one night before wandering around the town a bit. Walking upstream alongside the Tay, we found a nicely arched pedestrian bridge and just above the town on a hilltop was a series of three arches. That turned out to be the only remaining wall of an old church that had otherwise collapsed into ruins. Returning to our room for dinner, I opened the window and we listened to the soft swish of the Tay going over a small spillway just outside our window as I worked on the journal--very relaxing!

Copyright 2010 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Map of Scotland Map of England Map of Rest of Lands Epilog

August 2009
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9 10 11 12 13 14 15
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30 31
September 2009
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1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
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