William Newton’s Cressbrook Mill at Water-cum-Jolly may well be “august” (Country diary, 5 November). However, in its heyday it was a place of hideous cruelty and exploitation, where “apprentices”, the starving children of London orphanages, were brought in to be worked literally to death in many cases, in pursuit of fat profits for the mill owners, Newton included. I always think of those enslaved children as I walk through the dale. The mill itself gives me the creeps.
Isabella Stone
Sheffield
• The Orpheus mosaic lies buried here in Woodchester, not Wotton-under-Edge as your editorial said (5 November). Don’t all rush to see it, however. The last time it was uncovered in 1973, 140,000 visitors caused such traffic congestion that it was decided by the village that it should never be unearthed again.
Jean Lawton
Woodchester, Gloucestershire
• Picking figs on 1 November in Surrey (Letters, 3 November)? Here on the South Yorkshire/Sheffield border, at almost 700 feet, we still have four or five ripening figs almost ready to harvest.
Kirsten Cubitt Thorley
Dore, Sheffield
• The track Garden of Eden on the first New Riders of the Purple Sage album (1971) addresses the full range of today’s environmental concerns (Letters, 4 November).
Barry Gibson
Norwich
• Marina Hyde excelled herself by creating a word that will for ever be used to describe this government: “blunderrhoea” (5 November).
Peter Barbor
Wambrook, Somerset
