Weather: mainly sunny, with just one shower whilst we were out, and a temperature in the mid to high teens.
I don't recall another year when the weather has been so reliably warm that I've worn shorts for months at a time. This year I managed four months (almost) straight, with just one cool day in August when I donned longs. Had we been in England in May, I would have managed nearly 5 months, but May in Scotland was still cold. Today the temperature was marginal, and I decided that, with it now being October, it wouldn't be inappropriate to don something warmer. Mick is still persisting in shorts.
Aside from our chosen attire, our day didn't get off to the best of starts. The journey to Styal was supposed to be 24 miles with a journey time of 50 minutes, but we twice got thwarted by road closures with no signed diversions (and no advance warning signs at the start of the road), where the only option was to turn around and retrace several miles to the main road, to find another route. The journey ended up taking us nearer an hour and a half with an unknown number of miles covered. We hoped getting back would be easier and that our destination would be worth the trouble.
It was absolutely worth the trouble! What an excellent and interesting day out at Quarry Bank Mill. It's a National Trust Property, but something of an outlier, as it's not a grand mansion but a 'working' cotton mill. It's no longer in commercial operation, but it still has machinery inside, which is run every now and then throughout the day by way of giving demonstrations to visitors. Aside from the mill building itself, there's the owner's house, the apprentice house and, in the old village of Styal, a worker's cottage (only open on Thursdays and weekends, hence our decision to visit today), plus formal gardens and lots of grounds.
The Apprentice House and the Worker's Cottage are only accessible via a guided tour and we opted to do the former first (a 45-minute tour), followed by a lunch break of just over an hour, then the latter (half hour tour). We possibly just got lucky with the host for the Apprentice House tour, but he was absolutely excellent - entertaining and thoroughly polished with his delivery. The Worker's Cottage tour was fine, but the first one had set a high bar.
It was knocking on for 2.45pm by the time we got to the owner's house, so we only had a few minutes to wait before the next entrance window (they give an introductory talk every 15 minutes, following which you're free to walk around the ground floor), and finally we were off to see the headline act: the four occupied floors of the mill.
Even though the site is open until 5.30pm, it was almost deserted by the time we emerged from the mill at knocking on for 4.30pm. We still hadn't seen the gardens, nor walked around any of the grounds that weren't incidental to getting between the buildings, but knowing that we had a potentially long journey to get back to Bertie, and that we were running into rush hour, we didn't try to cram them into the day.
I'm happy to say that the return journey went much more smoothly (groans were heard when we came upon yet another 'road closed' sign, but with Erica too big to turn around in the road, I had to continue, leading me to discover that there was no obstruction and we were able to pop out the other side of the closure unimpeded). I then took the risk of taking one of the roads that had been closed this morning, and that paid off too, with it now being open again.
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