A long and excruciatingly flowery description of Stokesley in the D&S of 150 years ago this week is extremely short on facts but makes one startling claim.
“Stokesley has many attractions,” it begins. “Nestling at the entrance of a quiet and isolated valley, with the Cleveland hills for a background, and shut out from the ‘haste and waste’ of industrial life, it leads a humdrum stereotyped existence, which may not be calculated to stimulate the aborigines to undertake great achievements but is certainly congenial to the tranquillity of the soul at once so rare and so refreshing to ‘city men’,” it begins.
It notes how Mr Pratt’s large printing establishment has recently closed as, it says, has a large mill. It was “a factory of considerable extent which was carried on in Stokesley for a number of years, in the days when Newfoundland dogs supplied motive power to the looms”.
Was there ever a dog-powered mill in Stokesley, or anywhere else for that matter, or has the writer taken leave of his senses on a flowery flight of fancy?
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