Samples from the Cathedral of Cloth

This morning I suddenly realised that today was the the final day of the Cathedral of Cloth exhibition at the Museum in the Park. Ebley Mill, which now houses Stroud District Council, was the largest cloth-weaving mill in the area until it finally closed in 1982.

The exhibition covered the different centuries of ownership, expansion and cloth production at the mill, and included this nostalgia-inducing pile of suitcases that represented the cloth samples sent to Charles Brown, the company's agent in Calais, who took the samples of tweed and other cloths to Austria, Germany and other European countries, travelling by steam train.

We found the exhibition well worth the visit.