Built in 1786, it was run by John Kay initially as a fulling mill. This is the procedure where woollen cloth is mechanically beaten by large wooden mallets, driven by a water wheel. This enables the wool fibres to become locked together, while at the same time driving out excess hair and fat from the fabric.
By 1809, we know that the mill was being used to perform a whole range of textile procedures. An advert in the Manchester Mercury has the mill placed up for auction and details its contents. These include a carding engine (used to prepare a woollen fleece for spinning), a ‘billy’ (an improved form of a Spinning Jenny), a ‘teaser’ (a circular drum covered with heads from the spiky teasel flower to improve the texture of the cloth by raising its nap) and a blueing house (where the cloth was hung and sulphur dioxide fumes from a brimstone stove would bleach it).