Greenfield Valley Heritage Park, near Holywell, is home to a wide range of objects in their museum collection, from farm machinery to household items and historic buildings.

The majority of the collections span a date range between 1850 and 1950 covering a variety of themes including agriculture, social history and the industrial history of the local area.

Here we take a brief look at items related to two of the collections at the park with links to the local area.

• Holywell textile mill

The mill was located next to St Winefride’s Well and like many factories it used the spring water in the manufacturing process.

The factory produced many high quality woollen products including tweed jackets, tapestries and blankets made from Jacob wool.

In the First and Second World Wars the factory produced uniforms for French and British soldiers.

The factory closed in the 1980s and was partly demolished although the shop building still remains.

The museum has a number of objects related to the mill that were saved from the factory floor, including carding combs, shuttles and batch number boards, as well as examples of their products.

There is also a small photographic archive. Many local people were employed here and their memories have been recorded at the museum as an audio record.

• Tapper collection

Joan Tapper (Morris) was born in 1920 near the village of Ysceifiog and her father Gwilym Morris was a farmer, engineer and local Magistrate. By the time Joan was born, her father was making plans to build a mill pond on his farm near the village of Ysceifiog, in order to use an iron waterwheel he had acquired from two spinster sisters, to generate electricity.

It was very rare for electricity to be available in rural areas in the 1920s so Gwilym was a real innovator. He used his technical and engineering knowledge to install the wheel on his farm and used it to power not only the lights and machinery on the farm but also the local chapel on Sundays.

“We never had power cuts in our house!”, declared Mrs Tapper.

The waterwheel was used into the 1950s and by the 1980s Mrs Tapper had donated the wheel to Erddig and from there it was moved to a mill in Pentrfoelas. By 2011, plans were underway for the wheel to come to Greenfield Valley and for a conservation project to begin.

A group of volunteers lead by the Museum Warden restored the wheel to working order which can be viewed at the museum. Mrs Tapper donated a number of other objects related to her family, including her father’s motorcycle goggles and Victorian box irons used by her mother.

• You can discover more about the heritage park here.

If you have any memories to share, you can do so here or email claire.pierce@newsquest.co.uk