What they found

'John and I don't often agree, but we agree about that water wheel and this anomaly.' Time Team landscape archaeologist Stewart Ainsworth was talking about his efforts with geophysics supremo John Gater to locate the site of the wheel pit that formed the centrepiece of the water-pumping system in Richard Arkwright's first factory. John was deploying his familiar armoury of geophysics surveying equipment with a particular emphasis on ground-penetrating radar to be able to see beneath the multiple layers of tarmac, concrete, brick and stone on the site. And Stewart was making use of his usual array of maps, drawings and other records.

In theory, it should have been a relatively straightforward task to identify the floorplan and what was left of Arkwright's original 1781 factory. Arkwright's factories were built to a regular plan and records from the time of its construction provided the Team with the basic dimensions and layout. Indeed, Phil Harding came down on what appeared to be one of the original Arkwright walls within an hour or two of Time Team starting work on the site. Since the records stated that Arkwright's factory was 30 feet wide, it seemed to be a simple matter of using a tape measure to locate the other walls.

The first difficulty arose when the excavators began to uncover the row of central columns that would have supported the factory roof. It didn't match up with where it should have been in relation to the outer walls. Then it was realised that the fact that a wall had been built with bricks dating from the late 18th century didn't mean that the wall itself dated from that period. Arkwright's factory had been completely burnt down and rebuilt in 1850 and the bricks originally used by Arkwright could have been reused on numerous occasions as the site was developed and altered over the years. To add to the complications, the whole site had been subject to a devastating air raid by the Luftwaffe during the second world war (it has been a car park ever since).

It took the Team virtually the whole three days to sort out exactly what was going on. Phil came up with the idea of dating the walls he excavated not by the bricks that were used in their construction but by the mortar. Like the bricks, this varied over time but would not have been reused at a later date.

Examination of the mortar confirmed that the wall initially uncovered by Phil early on the first day was indeed one of Arkwright's first walls. Further excavation revealed that the row of central columns was also from this first factory but the records from the time, describing the factory as 30 feet wide, were wrong; in fact, the factory was 40 feet wide.

John and Stewart's agreement about the geophysics anomaly also turned out to be wrong: the anomaly was, in fact, a modern drain. But the Team did find something that was described as 'monumental' by Mike Nevell, director of the Manchester University Archaeology Unit, who worked on the dig with Time Team. This was the pit that would have housed one end of the Newcomen steam pumping engine, which Arkwright installed to power his textile machinery.

The use of the Newcomen engine to drive the machinery directly was unsuccessful and Arkwright reused the pit in a redesigned water system. Under this, an engine was used to pump water between lower and upper ponds on the factory site, pushing water over a water wheel in the centre of the factory. This then drove the textile machinery itself.

Arkwright's factory was the first time someone had tried to use steam to power textile machinery. Within 18 years, Manchester became the biggest mill town in the world boasting around 50 mills; and within just a few decades the methods Arkwright pioneered had spread throughout British industry. The industrial revolution was to transform not just Britain but whole world.

As Mike Nevell commented, 'This site is of national and even international importance. This is where the modern world begins.'

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