The museum at Golcar provides many illuminating insights into the lives of nineteenth-century makers of woollen cloth, and into the ways in which domestic manufacturing gradually evolved into factory-based production.
The museum occupies three of a terrace of four 3-storey cottages called Spring Rock, built in the 1840s by a family of independent woollen cloth makers whose descendants still live in the village. The terrace, a Grade 2 listed building, is built into a steep hillside, and there is a door into the top storey from ground level at the rear. Within the cottages are spinning wheels, hand looms and other items used in the making of woollen cloth, while at the rear are tenter posts, brought from elsewhere. In the wall, and elsewhere in the village, are ‘wuzzing holes’ in which sticks to which baskets of wet wool were attached were rotated to spin the wool dry. The kitchen of the cottages has a flagstone floor ornamented with rag rugs. Its centrepiece is a Yorkshire range that was used for cooking, heating and supplying hot water.
There are many similar cottages once occupied by makers of woollen cloth in Golcar and adjacent villages.