by Maureen Laing Sunday 8th June saw a small group of DHS members gather in Leys Park Road car park, board a small coach and head south west to Garrion Bridges Garden and Antiques Centre for our first stop on this year’s summer trip. We were served hot drinks and scones before spending a pleasant hour perusing the garden centre, antiques, bric-a-brac and shopping outlets.    Next stop, New Lanark World Heritage Site and the Falls of Clyde. A brief history In the late 18th Century, David Dale, a Glasgow businessman, and Robert Arkwright, the inventor of the water-powered spinning frame, founded a cotton spinning village just downstream from the Falls of Clyde.  Mill 1 was completed in 1785, Mills 2 and 3 followed.  Accommodation for the factory workers and their families, many from the Highlands, was built over the next decade. Robert Owen, a young Manchester based mill manager, visited New Lanark, where met and married David Dale’s eldest daughter Caroline.  Around 1800, in partnership with two others, he purchased New Lanark from his father-in-law and assumed management of the mills and village. He expanded the factory, adding mechanics workshops and dye works.        He then began to transform the lives of the mill workers and their families by introducing social, moral, educational and workplace reforms.  He established a village shop that sold quality goods at fair prices, opened the centrepiece of his social experiment, The Institute for the Formation of Character,…