Saturday 4 August: We’ll pay a visit to Shirley’s bone and flint mill at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent. Afterwards, we’ll take a look at the museum at Apedale Heritage Centre, just a few miles away near Newcastle-under-Lyme. We could always have a ride on the railway too… Lunch? Oatcakes, of course!
That’s Stoke-on-Trent, not Italy, though there’s a connection – pottery. The Etruria Industrial Museum preserves, in working order, Jesse Shirley’s Bone and Flint Mill, for many years a supplier of finely ground calcined bone and flint (oddly enough) for the manufacture of Staffordshire china. Steam powered, the museum operates on a limited number of days each year – including this weekend, when there would be a gathering of working boats on the canal beside the works. Somewhere old – and for us, somewhere new, a most interesting little outing (and tea and cakes, but sadly not oatcakes – they’d all gone…).
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