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This bank holiday I’m heading out with a friend to dig... not just into the ground, but into fire, memory, and myth. It’s part of a new Harrowden art piece, but the line between fiction and the real world is burning thin here... excuse me while we snap a little back to reality...
My dad told me about this old cotton mill where they used to chuck "soot stones" straight down a steep banking into the river, hot black lumps, ball baring size fire spat out the furnace, still crackling. There was no bother for pollution or health and safety back then. Just tip it in, let the river take it... He said him and his mates used to play on the slope, slipping down it like it were a playground in the 60's...
We’ve managed to piece it together and found the spot on google and an old map, the actual mill has gone now but it looks like it's still wasteland, sat by another set of abandoned mills still there. We’re going to try excavating this Saturday. If it’s anything like the "big crackleblacks" we found from the last remains of the old coal power station early this week, it might still be there, buried cinders waiting to be brought to the surface.
In Harrowden, these are called Crackleblack, industrial relics that hum with leftover heat, fossilised labour, the detritus of soot-belching machines, the history of one thousand hard shifts. I want to collect them, preserve them, build something from their smouldering silence.
There is also another personal story in this place we are going. Just across the river from the site is where my gran arrived from Ireland, a teenage girl entering the country with forged documents from her village priest. She came to work the mills, and stayed in Mill lodging in a place called "The Bleachery". She'd send money home as Ireland was dirt poor back then and her mother had younger mouths to feed. A fire... this time not in the ground, but burning in her need to survive, to shape something better out of cotton, cinder and ash. And why I am here...
The mills and cotton run through my family, we all worked in the textiles factories including myself...
So yep... its an art piece, But it’s a bit like digging through cinders to find where I come from... An act of remembrance... An excavation of family, flame, and forgotten furnaces.
I’ll keep you folk updated and post what we find, if the land’s in a giving mood! 🖤❤️