Newspaper article from our research archive:

Last horsehair loom in UK faces closure

A LOOM at John Boyd Textiles takes one day to weave just a metre of fabric.

But patience is a virtue the Somerset-based company has had plenty of time to acquire: the patented looms were installed in its Castle Cary mill in 1872 and have been running ever since.

What makes their product so special is that John Boyd is one of the world's two surviving horsehair fabric factories (the other is in Paris) and if these machines are destroyed their ingenious mechanism, which plucks one hair at a time from a tail to weave as weft into the fabric, will be lost for ever. On-site workshops have staved off this fate for more than 100 years but now the future of the factory lies in the hand of the estate ...

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