Everything you didn’t know that you didnt know about horse hair weaving

You can never keep the Mills team away from a good textile experience and in November last year, William, Sarah and Jack visited John Boyd Textiles in Somerset – horsehair weavers since 1837. Read on for the full technical and fascinating description of what he discovered!

Tucked away in the village of Castle Cary in deepest Somerset is the UK’s only horsehair weaver, John Boyd Textiles. Unsurprisingly, horsehair weaving is on the Heritage Crafts Red List, categorised as critically endangered with a serious risk of not being practiced in the UK. 

We were greeted by Anna Smith the Managing Director. Anna has worked at John Boyd for a number of years, having previously worked for Courtaulds where she got valuable exposure to a wide range of textile mills. She employs a dozen people drawn from the local community. The company operates out of a Grade 2* listed former flax mill, architecturally one of the most complete textile mills in the South West of England and certainly the last one still in full time production. The mill ponds have been built over, but there is still a complete covered rope walk to one side of a range of the two and three-storey hamstone buildings. 

Horsehair fabric is a lightweight, strong, smooth, half-width cloth (approximately 30” wide). The horsehair gives it a moderate lustre, similar to worsted spun mohair, and the cloth is similarly stiff. The horsehair comes from cut horses’ tails. Single hairs are inserted as weft picks across a 3-fold cotton, linen or silk warp. The width of the fabric is thus limited by the average length of the tail hairs. 

There used to be an abundance of horsehair in previous centuries, as it was common practice to crop the working horses’ tails for animal welfare reasons. But from the beginning of the last century motorised power meant the supply diminished considerably. Now the hair is sourced via a complex trade route from Mongolia. It comes in several natural shades from cream to “grey” (actually dark brown) to black. The quality of the hair varies, critical factors being its diameter, length, elasticity and stiffness. 

The manufacturing process is a set of relatively straight forward steps, but with the intriguingly complex feat of mechanically picking up individual hairs to insert in the weft as part of the weaving process. The hairs arrive pre-sorted in bundles. Each bundle needs to be carefully inspected for discoloured hairs. These rogue hairs are hand-picked out of the bundle before processing. The bundle is then hand combed through a hackle of upright sharp steel pins to straighten out all the hairs. 

Most hair is then dyed to the desired shade. Being a protein fibre, acid milling dyes are used in a simple exhaust bath. The dyehouse is one of the wonderful examples of where John Boyd Textiles has tapped into the local skill base; the dyebaths are essentially modified tanks from the milking parlours that can be found in the surrounding dairy farms. Another example being the cloth press which is an adapted cider apple press. 

John Boyd has its own exclusive shade range and takes great pride in the fact that it can reproduce exactly a historic cloth woven decades ago. The warp is normally cotton but linen and silk are also used to produce a stronger or more lustrous fabric respectively. A simple sectional warper with a tensioned creel is used, the warp is typically 60-70 yards long, enough to weave a single piece (roll). In sectional warping, 50 or so bobbins are loaded into the creel and then the required warp length is wound into the swift (large, lightweight cylinder), then the machine is moved along to allow the next 50 ends to be wound onto the swift. This is done a number of times until the total number of ends in the warp, which will total several thousand, are on the swift. They are then wound off onto the warp beam ready for tying into the loom. The advantages of sectional warping over direct warping are several; the warper only needs a fraction of the number of bobbins that there are number of ends in the warp, this means that the machine is a fraction of the size, the warper only has to control 50 or so ends at any one time rather than thousands and given that there will always be a length of yarn left on each bobbin after finishing the warp,  there is a lot less waste. 

The heart of Boyds is the weaving sheds. At its peak there were over 100 looms, now there are 30-40 split over 2 floors in the Georgian mill building. A narrow set of worn, wooden stairs leads you into the room where the magic happens. The first thing that strikes you is the relative quietness of the shed, those of you that have been into a weaving shed running at full tilt will be familiar with the roar of the looms that greets you as soon as the shed door is opened. Each weaver patrols 10 looms, most of which have a dobby to produce the pattern although there are some simple tappet looms running on plain weave.  

John Boyd, a Scottish cloth merchant arrived in Somerset and set up as a handloom horsehair weaver in his cottage in late Georgian times. This was a time of great invention in the all-important textile industry in the UK, and the power loom had recently been invented. His innovation was to develop a delicate apparatus that acts like a finger and thumb to pick up a single horsehair from a bundle and to present this to a rapier that then drags the hair through the shed of the loom to insert the pick. In addition, through a simple lever it recognises whether it has been successful in picking up a hair, if not the loom tries again before turning over the dobby to progress the pattern. A single horsehair is not uniform in diameter or colour over its length; the end nearest the horse’s rump is thicker and less yellowed by the horse’s urine, so the looms perform a second bit of wizardry to even out these differences in the final fabric; there is not one bundle of hair that the fingers can select from but two, each placed in opposite orientations in a scoop, between each pick the scoop gently rocks allowing the fingers to select each consecutive pick first from one bundle then from the second bundle. The delicate operation of selecting individual alternating hairs means that the looms run at about 20 picks per minute. The cloth typically has about 90 picks per inch, so it takes about a month to weave a single piece – this is very much a craft despite its mechanisation, and the skill of the weaver remains central to the process.  

Horsehair is a natural fibre, and consequently is predictably temperamental, its weavability is particularly affected by its moisture content and the weaver might have to wet the hairs to improve the performance of the loom. And as with so many original crafts the craftsperson also makes their own tools. The delicate fingers that pinch the hairs are each crafted by the weaver; different thicknesses of hairs need differently finished fingers, and to further add to the complexity, the harsh hairs abrade the ends of the fingers and so they need to be regularly re-engineered so that they continue to work. No weaver would ever use fingers made by someone else – this is a deeply personal craft. The loom remains unchanged since it was patented by John Boyd nearly 200 years ago. There was some controversy around the granting of the original patent, as Boyd was helped by a freelance engineer to finesse the process. The itinerant engineer claimed joint innovation, however, as is often the case “possession is more than half the battle”. Boyd owned the looms and was responsible for commercialising the process so was granted sole patent holder.  

Once woven the finishing process is very simple. There is no mending; the looms are run at such a speed that faults do not regularly occur. Any broken ends are sewn back in by the weaver on the loom. There are no fallers on the loom so the weaver needs to be on guard to spot a broken end as the loom will not automatically stop. But practically it is hard to disguise faults so they are normally just “strung” (marked with a coloured tag in the selvedge). 

As with all textiles pressing can be transformational – giving the fabric a wonderful sheen, enhancing its key characteristic of lustre. It also helps set the cloth, giving it more stability in use. Boyd’s press finish is a 100% traditional English Press finish. The cloth is manually folded between alternate layers of cards. Heavy preheated steel plates are intermittently introduced to the stack of cloth and cards to gently heat the cloth. The whole sandwich is then place in the vertical screw press and manually cranked to the desired pressure and left overnight. 

John Boyd produces a standard range of patterns and shades to stock although exclusive enquiries will be considered if of a sufficient quantity. The unique cloth is primarily used for upholstery. It is smooth and stiff , very hard wearing and was traditionally used for seat pads due to its natural high abrasion resistance. It is not used in applications where there is a high price sensitivity, so would typically end up in heritage restoration/recreation projects, hotels and other luxury markets. 

The fabric celebrates the texture and lustre of the hairs. The woven structure is generally very simple plain weave, hopsack or twill, but the hair gives a variation of shade and grain across the weft which is very pleasing to the eye. Beyond the long running traditional shade range, Boyd’s runs a limited number of seasonal shades. Shades vary from the natural hues of ecrus through to jet black, and eye-popping pinks, blues and acid greens. John Boyd horsehair fabrics can be seen at all the major interior shows in the UK and Europe and they also have representation in London at Chelsea Harbour. 

It was a great privilege to see the skill of horsehair weaving not only being kept alive but a commercial success too. 

I am indebted to Anna Smith for her generosity of time and knowledge, to the workers of John Boyd Textiles who allowed us to witness their skills first hand, and to Janet Mongomery, High Sheriff for Somerset, for facilitating our visit to this unique mill. 

William Gaunt. Visited in November 2025.

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