A guided tour around St Mary's Mill engine room

Woody and I drove to  St Mary's Mill three miles up the Frome valley,near Chalford, to begin our series of visits today.  It was a day when the engine room and water wheel are open to the public, with the added bonus of a guided tour from Ian Mackintosh, the learned head of the Stroudwater Textile Trust.  Here you can just about see him explaining how the various pieces of old equipment worked and were used at different periods of the the mill's history. Ian's wife Anne is a fellow trustee, and the co-founder, of our Stroud Preservation Trust and I am lucky to have close access to their enormous knowledge of these fine buildings, which I have blipped several times before. In the 'Extra photos' I have added an exterior view of St. Mary's Mill on the left and the old rather derelict adjacent mill building backing on to the canal. The river flows under the main mill in the foreground where the netting marks the edge of what remains of the old mill pond, now mostly infilled. as a car park.

We then drove out of the valley and over Minchinhampton Common to Nailsworth where we visited the Open Studio of Amanda who is an acrylic artist specialising in natural history subjects.  It was fascinating to see her work decorating the walls of her house and to meet her partner Kevin who showed me around their converted cottages set high on the very steep hillside overlooking Ruskin Mill. 

Then we continued on up the valley to the next village, Horsley, where we saw another artist's work. His very large prints of scenes of Devon were wonderful to behold.  The exhibition's setting was in the house of a friend of his, an architect whom I knew and I was very pleased to see him again. While we were there four different groups of people arrived to view the work and between Helena and we knew all of them. The Open Studios are a very pleasing way of discovering creative people and new places. I now wish I had managed to see more of them in the last few weeks.