The last loom in Wrenford

You hear the loom before you see it. On the top floor of the old mill on the river, in a room built for forty of them, a single wooden floor loom clatters on, steady as a heartbeat, from about eight in the morning until the light goes.

It belongs to Nell Arden, who bought it for almost nothing at a farm sale twelve years ago and spent a winter putting it back together. She weaves blankets, mostly, in undyed wool from three farms within a day’s walk of the mill, and each one takes her about two weeks.

A warp is a promise

“Everything happens before you weave,” she says. Setting up the warp, the long threads that run the length of the cloth, can take three days: winding hundreds of threads to the same length and tension, threading each one through the heddles and the reed in the right order. Get one wrong and you’ll see it in every inch of the blanket.

A warp is a promise. Once it’s on the loom, you’re going to weave it, whatever you’re feeling that week.

Then the weaving itself, which looks so simple from across the room: press a treadle, throw the shuttle, beat the thread into place, press the next treadle. Ten thousand times a blanket. She doesn’t listen to music while she works. “The loom’s the music,” she says, a little embarrassed.

Two years and counting

People find her through a friend of a friend, or through the blanket on someone’s sofa. The waiting list is two years long and she has stopped apologising for it. She could buy a second loom, she says, or teach someone, and one day she probably will. For now there’s one loom, one weaver, and the sound of it going all day through the empty floors of a building made for something much bigger.