Even if you have visited Dunkirk or St Mary’s Mills several times there is something new to see there. At Dunkirk Mill Centre volunteers have installed a milling machine that was built in the 1850s and worked at Stanley Mill until the 1980s when it was filmed. Now it is driven by the waterwheel and we can explain why the fulling stocks fell silent.

It shrank the cloth so effectively that it consigned the noisy fulling hammers to History. Stroud has a rich heritage of fulling mills for which it is famous. Now we can demonstrate both the noisy fulling hammers and this quiet replacement whose working principles are still in use today.

The people of Nailsworth must have been delighted when local mills invested in these machines. They used to wake to the thump of the fulling hammers six days a week. Then Day’s Mill invested in seven of them and Dunkirk in six. Suddenly there must have been silence. Modern day visitors can now appreciate the benefit.

Invented in 1833 in Wiltshire a local foundry considerably improved the machine in the 1850s. It was of course a Ferrabee, from that inventive family that established Phoenix Ironworks, Thrupp, the birthplace of the lawnmower. James in the early 1850s launched his “improved fulling machine.” In 1862 at the London Industrial Exhibition he won a medal for the lawnmower, an honourable mention for his steam engine and another medal in part for his machine adapted “for woollen goods which vary in bulk and character; intended to avoid wrinkling during fulling.”

That was the acme of James’s career for the next year he was bankrupt and one of his fulling machines appears in the sale of his goods. The memory of the inventive Ferrabee family has been strengthened. Besides the milling machine there is a working Ferrabee waterwheel and a shearing machine. Once there was also a Ferrabee steam engine. There is much local inventiveness to celebrate at Dunkirk.

The Trust is delighted it now has two of them on display. At St Mary’s Mill there is another that seems almost unchanged in character and worked in mid Wales until the 1960s. Being fragile we have arranged it to be driven by hand.