Exploring Round Wellbrook Beetling Mill CoTyrone

We are National Trust property Wellbrook Beetling Mill just a few miles outside Cookstown. Wellbrook, using Ballinderry river, water power, generated from a waterwheel, was Northern Ireland's last working beetling mill. Beetling was a process used in the manufacturing of linen from flax. The mill was in operation until 1961 and was given to the Trust, along with one acre of land, by a Mr. S. J. Henderson in 1967. Wellbrook NT was officially opened to the public in 1970. Beetling was the process that finished off linen. Water wheel powered cogs released wooden beetles that crasedh down on the linen, giving the cloth its characteristic smoothness and sheen. Wellbrook Beetling Mill began as a linen bleaching work opened by Hugh Faulkner and his brother in 1764. The future of Wellbrook prospered when James Irwin bought the bleaching works and replaced the then dilapidated building in the 1830’s with the building we see today. There were several rapidly expanding weaving mills in the local area and beetling was in high demand. The Ulster linen grew rapidly in the 19th century. Raw linen was sourced from Gunning and Moore’s Milburn Factory in Cookstown. It had a large export market to New Zealand and Australia. Wellbrook continued to produce finished linen well into the 1930’s. During WW1 its beetled linen was used for the fuselage in planes and other necessities. However, by the 1940s demand for linen began to fall as new cheap, alternative materials like rayon and polyesters began to flood the market. When their partners Gunning and Moore closed their doors in 1957 Wellbrook Beetling Mill found it very difficult to survive and the doors shut for the last time in 1961. Foreign manufacturers notably from India Pakistan and South Est Asia would soon bring about an end to local man made fibre, shirt and clothes factories too. Successive UK governments allowed all this to happen by opening the door to cheap foreign sourced imports. So from being a major linen clothing manufacturer in the 1930s and then a leading clothing and shirt manufacturer in the 1950s and 60s Northern Ireland now has no more than one or two small companies left trying to compete on the world market.