A guided walk around the 

Greenfield mill in Holywell,Flint

From the Visitor Centre at the Heritage Park we make our way up the now tranquil Greenfield Valley. On our right once stood the Parys Mine Co. 's Rolling Mill which produced copper sheets and bolts for more than half a century until it closed in 1847. The site was later cleared and is now a car park.

By the Abbey Farm we bear left and pass the Abbey Wire Mill, also formerly operated by the Parys Mine Co. Here, brass and copper wire was produced for use in the manufacture of nails and pins. This ended in 1901 and the site has since been transformed into a pleasant garden.

We follow the path alongside the old Wire Mill reservoir and soon see the former Lower Cotton Mill (later the Victoria Corn Mill) below on our right. Built in only 10 short weeks in 1785, the mill was six stories high, 108 feet long and 30 feet wide. The last cotton was spun here in 1840 and the mill was later used to grind corn. The warehouse has been rebuilt and will be used as a working mineral water museum.

Continuing up the valley, we next come to the site of the Meadow Mills, built in 1787 to manufacture copper goods and later, lead, tinplate and brass.

After joining the route of the old railway to Holywell, we see below us on the right the site of the Battery Works, the largest works in the Valley. Between 1766 and 1894, this works produced enormous quantities of brass and copper goods and utensils, many of which were shipped out to the west coast of Africa by Liverpool merchants who traded them for slaves for the West Indies and America. Pans, bowls and kettles were especially in demand as well as brass and copper rods which could be made into both rings and ornaments or used as a form of currency.

Following closure in 1894, parts of the site were used for a variety of purposes such as seaweed processing and warehousing. In 1912 the Gwalia Hosiery Company took over several buildings, manufacturing clothes here until a fire destroyed the works in the 1950's. Making our way down through the works and across the dam, we follow the track alongside the Battery Pool and up to the busy Greenfield-Holywell Road by the Royal Oak Public house.

Taking great care, we cross to the tiny community of Bryn Celyn. Following the narrow lane uphill, we turn to the left by Green Bank and pass the site of the Bowling Green described by Pennant as the meeting place for "...the most respectable men of business, tradesmen or mine-adventurers." Once a week, in those long-ago summers, these local worthies would gather here "...to amuse themselves with the innocent recreation." During intervals in play they would adjourn to an adjacent "room of retreat" to smoke their pipes and drink ale or punch.

From here the lane becomes little more than a rough farm track as it passes through a small dingle. Where it turns sharply uphill, we keep straight ahead, aiming for the trees in the distance, and follow a former track to the ancient Moor Quarries, now filled in, from where sandstone was worked for many centuries.

Once past the quarry entrance, our way runs past the former Moor Cottage, now a derelict ruin. With the wide Dee estuary away to our right, we follow the path to Stockyn Hell, once owned by a branch of the Mostyn family of Talacre Hall.

After passing the Hall we follow a path down into Stockyn Dingle and cross a footbridge over a stream called the Afon Morsiandwr or Merchant's River. The 'Merchants' are thought to have been smugglers who ran their illicit cargoes into the lower reaches of the Marsiandwr were it flows into the Dee.

From the dingle the path leads to a quiet lane and turning right we follow this downhill. As we near the foot of the hill, we pass Isglan on the left, once the seat of the Pierce family. The family became extinct before Pennant's time and the house passed into other hands and is today a farm. Isglan had obviously been a place of great importance long ago, giving its name to the Township in which it stood.

At the foot of the hill is the busy A548 road between Chester and the North Wales coast. Again taking great care, we cross this to a stile and follow the footpath alongside a small factory towards the Chester-Holyhead railway line. Keeping an eye out for approaching trains we cross the tracks on the level and continue straight ahead towards the embankments running along the banks of the estuary The earliest was built during the 18th century in an effort to improve the navigation by deepening and straightening the main channel and the second in the early years of the present century.

Today, the wide expanse of the Dee estuary is rarely disturbed by passing ships. The numerous vessels that once made their way up and down the river are now just a distant memory. The crumbling remains of the once-busy Greenfield Dock lie ahead. It is hard to believe that this was one of the busiest ports on the Dee during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Leaving the embankment we follow the road over the Chester and Holyhead railway by the former Holywell Junction Station, closed in the 1960's. Reaching the busy A548 once more, we cross to a narrow lane leading up into the valley and return to our starting point opposite the ancient ruins of Basingwerk Abbey.

The monks of Basingwerk Abbey were probably the first "industrialists" of the Greenfield Valley. They operated corn and fulling mills here and worked the rich silver-lead mines in the hills near Holywell. The Abbey grew wealthy from its mines, mills and estates but, following its dissolution in 1536, the monks departed and within a short time the venerable old building was being pillaged for its stone and timber. Fortunately, the Abbey came into the hands of the Mostyn family of Talacre, who restored part of the Abbey and lived there for more than 150 years until the end of the seventeenth century. Once more the abbey fell victim to the scavengers. Now, many of its stones were taken to build the mills and works that began to dominate the valley as the Abbey once had. An ancestor of Pennant, Thomas ap David Pennant had been Abbot of Basingwerk in the dosing years of the 15th century, would surely be turning in his grave.

Pennant observed that, despite the valley's seemingly healthy location, "a rapid stream and for the greatest part of the year a brisk wind," it was not the healthiest place to live. It was, he noted, "visited with the usual diseases of the country, in a degree even greater than other parts; nor has the Angina Maligna (a disease that was raging in both Greenfield and Halkyn in 1794, with a fatality rate of up to 70% in children between the ages of 3 and 5) spared the children of this little tract." Angina Maligna may have been connected with the poor living conditions of that period or related to the local mining or smelting industries.

Pennant had witnessed the beginning of the Greenfield Valley's "Golden Age". The "sacred stream" that had once "hurried to the sea unconfined by the busy manufactures" now found its course impeded by dams, weirs, leats and waterwheels. Where once monks had meditated and pilgrims prayed by the scared stones of the Abbey and holy well a new religion was being practised. It was preached by men who were more interested in profits than psalms, its "churches" had chimneys in place of spires and its "congregations" came to feed their bellies and not their souls.

Lentin on Copper and Brass manufacturing processes

Lentin in 1800 visited and wrote about the brass factories at Holywell in flint.

…I will now take you into the copper factories, where one occupies oneself in particular with the finishing of sheet copper for ships, bolts of varying diameters, engraved copper plates, nails, Dutch farthings, rudder braces and the bottoms of large rum and brandy boilers as well as the bottoms of stills and boilers.

The rudder braces, which serve to fasten the steering rudder on the large warships and East-Indian clippers are finished just like the bottoms, under the large hammer, which is set up much like our own hammers. The rudder braces are incontestably the most difficult of all copper work. The braces consist of two fork-shaped pieces, each weighing 80 - 120 pounds; one of them a spindle of gun metal affixed to the reverse side, which fits exactly into an opening on the other but can move itself freely within the opening like a hinge pivot.

The other items mentioned above are finished completely, or in great part, by a rolling mill.  I note here, in addition, that such rollers have different dimensions; some are three feet long and one and a half feet in diameter; others, on the other hand, are six feet long and 11 inches in diameter. They must be trued most precisely and polished with emery and oil.  The shorter roller serves for the first run of the still thick copper cakes; the others for the completion of the sheeting.

The operation begins by heating the copper cake in an annealing furnace until it glows bright red; then one sets the wheels going, which start the short roller, and fix the screws so that the pressure on the copper is not too great at the beginning. The master puts a glowing cake through the rollers and this  is received by an apprentice standing on the other side with tongs. The cake is then handed back to the master over the upper roller, and he sends it through again after he has set the rollers closer together.  This is repeated until the cake is slimmed down to a thickness of half an inch and the edges start to tear.  To keep the upper roller from falling down with any force while the copper cake is still thick and is passing through the rollers, the master sends through a wedge-shaped board along with the cake,  which is longer than the cake and gradually lets the rollers down again.

The copper sheets produced in this way are cut after cooling with large shears which are driven by the shaft which starts up the rollers. This is done to get rid of the small tears on the edges of the cakes which would spread with further rolling and spoil the whole sheet.  One cuts the cake through the middle, whereby bars are formed that are 15 - 17 inches square and half an inch thick.

These are heated till they glow bright red again and sent through the same rollers in such a way that the bars always go through in one direction and again become long rectangles. After these bars have been cut and annealed, they go under the big rollers, where the master lets them through on the width side and rolls them for as long as it takes to reach the required thinness.  The result, usually, is a tablet six feet long, four feet wide and .03 - .05 inches thick.

Because of the repeated annealing the surface of the bars becomes oxidised. To remove this coating and give the bars a lovely red appearance, they are heated till they are glowing red once more and then suddenly quenched in water mixed with urine and cooking salt. One places several of them on an iron plate specially made for this purpose and beats them quite flat with wooden mallets, cuts them at the edges and gives them the desired form, where after they are weighed and marked with the company stamp.

The large bolts are likewise finished with rollers which, for this purpose, are fitted with incisions, which gradually get smaller, and of which the largest are four-sided and the smaller are round. The copper is, in addition, poured into rods, which are four feet long and four inches square. These rods are likewise heated to glowing before they are placed under the roller. Then one sends them first through the largest incisions and gradually through the smaller incisions, until they have achieved the desired magnitude.  With this operation the bars must be heated to glowing several times; they eventually achieve a length anywhere from 16 - 24 feet and are set up afterwards on a ridged anvil.  They are likewise used in shipbuilding and one finishes them to a cross-section of two to a half inch square.

The copper wire from which one makes the nails is also manufactured with rollers which, however, for this purpose are only fitted with rectangular incisions.  The wire is required, moreover, to reduce down from a magnitude of a half inch square to .11 inch.  The wire is, in addition, cut on a press set up like coin presses and afterwards, when cold, drawn out by the nailsmith. Altogether the manufacture of nails employs over 100 people, because in addition to these copper nails there is also an exceptionally large quantity of nails poured from a mixture of brass with some tin, which one uses mainly to fasten sheeting on to a ship.  One forms them in ashes and clay, and the heads are turned on a lathe, an activity which occupies 16 - 20 turners continuously.

The sheets for copperplate engraving, as well as those out of which one cuts Dutch farthings, must be rolled again cold after they have been quenched.  This is done on special rollers which are called steel rollers but are really only manufactured from cast iron, which one transposes in a state which the English call case hardened, by annealing in cement.

This last operation is necessary to give the copper the necessary hardness which it has lost during annealing and quenching.  The farthings are cut on hand presses which have the same construction as our coin presses. It is hard to believe how many of these farthings, which, as you know, are the same size as our pfennige, are manufactured here. Eight cutting tools are running continuously day and night which makes it unlikely that the Dutch are using them just to impress farthings; it is more likely that they trade them on again to another country.

Outside of these items, a very large quantity of three feet long, .44 inch thick copper bars is manufactured and sent via slave traders to the coast of Guinea where the inhabitants wind them around their bodies then hang their money on them. The money is called manillas and is also manufactured in England. A manilla is shaped like a horseshoe or rather more like a suitcase handle and is made from a mixture of some copper and a lot of lead, which is then coated with black lead.

Copper swarf is smelted and refined again in the factory. The coating is collected from the sheets, and when there is enough of it, one melts it together with some coke and slag and adds the copper that falls away from it to the swarf which, by the way, is handled in the same way when refining as black copper  is when it is being refined.

The brass works of the company consists of eight roasting furnaces, a rolling mill and an iron foundry and vats. ..

  …The calamine, which is found quite frequently in this area, belongs, because of its abundance, to the most preferred of all known species.  It occurs in all colours - white, yellow-green and brown, mostly massive, however also crystallised into cubes, pyramids and spheres like chalcedony.  The crystals are always hollow and not seldom have the fibrous appearance of decaying bones.

The preparation of calamine begins when the separated calamine is thrown through a sieve with a mesh size of 1/2 inch square to separate the smaller from the larger pieces.  The latter are washed in settling tanks; then one takes out all the pieces that contain too much galena, calcite or other species of rock.

Seven hundredweight of the calamine that is left is carried to a calcining furnace and is calcined over a period of three hours at a rather high temperature while stirring frequently with iron rabblers.  During this operation the calamine loses a third of its weight, a loss which, according to Bergman and Watson, consists of carbonic acid and water.  Through this process the calcined calamine becomes very brittle.

After cooling it is broken into a crude powder with wooden mallets and washed - if it contains a lot of potter's ore/lead ore - in a washing trough or buddle, fitted with a slime box that is built almost the same as the slime troughs in our stamping mills.  Through this operation a considerable portion of the potter's ore is separated off, which did not undergo much of a change in the calcining furnace and did not become as brittle as the calamine and, therefore, has also not fallen in such small pieces as the calamine.

The worker divides the material which has collected in the buddle into three portions, of which the larger portion lying nearer the slime box runs to the side and afterwards is worked further in the settling tank. The middle, not too large portion, is beaten at the side of the buddle and washed through once again, because the separation of calamine from lead is still much too incomplete. The upper, mostly lead-containing portion finally is likewise specially set aside and worked through the settling tank.

Through the process the cruder lead ore portions are separated from the calamine; however, there still remains a considerable amount of it and all other rock species in that which I referred to as the first portion. The separation of these takes place in a settling tank through a fine-meshed sieve, whose openings are 3/16 of an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. The worker first tries to separate the finer from the cruder parts, in order to achieve a uniformity of size; then in another settling tank he separates the pure calamine from lead ore and earth types by moving the sieve for a time in a circular motion while shaking it up and down.  The earthy portion (e.g. spar), being the lightest, settles on top and is pulled together with a semi-circular wooden piece of board and taken away with the brass waste box.

Then the calamine is separated from the lead ore lying beneath it in precisely the same way, and after it has been dried in a calcining furnace, it is milled finely in a mill that is set up just like a flour mill.  The lead ore which is left on the bottom of the sieve and still contains some calamine is thrown in a box to be handled in a special way.

That which had settled out in the first wash in the settling tank is washed again in the previously mentioned buddle, whereby one once again keeps a lot of lead ore parts separate in the top part of the trough; the lower portion is dried in the calcining furnace and milled thereafter. The upper portion is put through a sieve, with a mesh size of 1/8 inch square using the same procedure as I described to you above; The calamine collected in this way is taken to the drying house, and the lead ore portion is thrown in the box with the rest of the lead ore.

I already said to you that the separated lead ore still contains a lot of calamine.  One separates this off by breaking it all up with iron mallets and then treating it in a settling tank with a sieve which has a horse hair bottom under which another of linen is suspended. The worker presses the sieve into the water, so that the water pushes in from underneath, whereupon he moves it in circles so that the slime can run off and the lead portion can sink to the bottom of the sieve. The calamine which the water could not take away is removed to the waste box and sent to dry. One treats the calamine which went through the sieve in the second wash in the same way.

According to the calculations of an employee 10 1/4 hundredweight of prepared calamine is produced from a ton or 20 hundredweight of raw calamine using this method.

The remaining procedure for brass roasting itself is not different in the main points from our process. It only deviates in that one uses granules of copper, which has the advantage that you can mix it more homogeneously with the calamine than we can with the refined copper.

The ratio of ingredients for sheet brass is: 34 pounds of copper; 38 - 40 pounds of calamine; 28 pounds of bulk material and 18 pounds of waste. This produces a sheet/bar that weighs 96 lbs, for one reckons here that three pounds of calamine yields one pound of zinc.

For impure brass, which is manufactured a lot here and sold to factories in Birmingham, the ratio is 45 lbs of copper, 28 lbs of calamine, 30 lbs of slime or also only 60 lbs of the last alone, from which one gets 70lbs of metal.

Normally, as is well known, 12 hours are reckoned for each casting; one tried to do it in eight hours and was successful.  The resulting brass had the proper elasticity and an increase in quantity also occurred regularly. This, shortened approach, deserves to be introduced into our brass factories, for one manufactures 1/3 more metal than the usual way, and can also save considerably on coal.

The manufactured brass sheet/bars are sent to the brass mill after they are cut, where they are rolled just as the copper is at the copper mill, with the difference that one always rolls brass cold. It is heated, allowed to cool, then rolled several times, and this procedure is repeated  until the brass reaches the proper thickness.

The annealing of the brass takes place in an annealing furnace, which is five feet long, four feet wide and six feet high, and which can be closed with a trap door, which consists of an iron frame lined with bricks. A hearth on which anthracite is fired is brought to each side of such a furnace, and the smoke flows through an opening in the vaulting of the furnace into the chimney flue, which encloses the entire furnace.

The sheets are put on iron wagons which stand on a trestle which, in turn, is put on a movable spindle on which iron rails are fixed for the wheels of the wagon to run on. The trestle is at the same height as the base of the furnace. 

The trestle holds two such wagons, with one loaded with sheets standing outside, while the other is inside the furnace. When the sheets on the latter are suitably annealed, the wagon, with the help of two winches which are fitted on the axle, is pulled onto the trestle, and one turns it so that the other loaded wagon can be pushed into the furnace.

The rolled sheets are hammered out into vessels of a wide variety of sizes, in particular, however, bowls, called Neptune's cups, were manufactured and used in trade round the coast of Guinea in exceptionally large quantities.  The bowls usually have a diameter of 28 - 31 inches, are four inches deep and have an equally wide rim. They are exceptionally thin, so that they resemble tinsel.