
Kintbury Lock © Copyright Pam Brophy and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License The characters in the book often walk along the canal towpath. This was created in the eighteenth century - right at the end of the garden of The Old Vicarage - so Jane Austen would have witnessed the navvies constructing it. At the time of my novel it had fallen into disuse by most commercial traffic in favour of the railway. Nowadays it is busy with barge-dwellers and holidaymakers, keen to travel through southern England by water. When my nephews were small boys they loved helping open the lock gates to passing boats. Kintbury had traditionally been the home to two important industries – the production of whiting, used for powdering wigs and faces and later as an ingredient in talcum powder. The Kintbury works involved open-cast mining of chalk, and the whiting was shipped from the Kintbury factory to London and Bristol by barges on the canal. With the advent of the railway this method of transportation died out. The whiting works were closed sometime during the second world war. Kintbury's second key industry was silk production. This had already ceased by the time of The Green Ribbons in 1900 – the factory closing in the 1840s, due to cheap imports of silk from the continent. So in 1900, when the book begins, Kintbury/ Nettlestock was more or less reliant on agriculture – itself suffering due to cheap American and Russian grain imports. Many of the villagers left the area in the nineteenth century and headed for the factories and mills of the prosperous Northern cities.
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