Richard Arkwright and the Scottish Cotton Industry

What is it about?

This article is based on documents housed in the Charter Room at Blair Castle, Perthshire, the traditional seat of the Dukes of Atholl, one of Scotland’s largest landowners. The Atholl estates stretched along the modern A9 from Calvine in the north to Dunkeld in the south, and included the land and water rights on the River Tay at Stanley, the site of a water powered cotton spinning mill, founded by a group of Perth merchants in 1784. Richard Arkwright, of Cromford, Derbyshire, the world’s first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill, played an important role in the establishment of the mills at Stanley. He held a £1,000 share in Stanley, out of a total subscribed capital of £7,000, trained the Stanley workforce at his mills in Cromford, and almost certainly, designed the brick built Bell Mill at Stanley, probably around 1787.

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Why is it important?

The Bell Mill at Stanley, the original water powered cotton spinning mill, is probably the finest surviving example in Britain of an original Arkwright designed water powered brick built cotton spinning mill, and is situated in a magnificent situation on the Tay, Scotland’s longest river. As such, it was the subject of a successful application by Historic Scotland, in conjunction with the Phoenix Trust, to the Heritage Lottery Fund for an eventual award of £8.8 million for the purchase and restoration of the mills. When Stanley Mills opened to the public in 2009, it won a Europa Nostra tourism award for the quality of the restoration, which included housing units in two of the three cotton mills on the site.

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