On a sunny morning on Thursday 26th September 32 members and friends boarded our coach for a day out in Hampshire. Our first venue was the Silk Mill in Whitchurch. After tea and coffee we embarked on a guided tour around the oldest working Silk Mill in the UK.
We explored the three floors of machinery dating back to the 1890's and saw how the young weavers and apprentices create beautiful material from the historic looms. It is a slow and precise process taking over 3 months to produce 150 metres of material from the raw silk still imported from China.
After our tour we enjoyed a lunch of hand made sandwiches and cake served by the Mill Trust volunteers. Unfortunately when it was time to leave and make our way to the nearby Bombay Sapphire Distillery the weather had changed, torrential rain and flooding everywhere!
It was too wet to take photos outside at the Distillery, the photo below is one from an earlier visit in the sun!
We started our guided tour by mixing a cocktail and watching a film about the history of the site which was originally a paper mill and bank note printers. Avoiding the rain we visited the spectacular glass houses where examples of all the spices and botanicals used in the manufacture are grown before moving on to the dry spice area to sample the ten ingredients that make up the unique flavour of Bombay Sapphire
After sampling the dried ingredients we were taken inside the Still House where the vacuum distillation takes place, producing several thousand litres every day of double strength gin which is pumped onto waiting tankers and sent to Glasgow for dilution and bottling.
Luckily some of the bottles had made their way back from Glasgow so there were plenty to choose from in the shop at the end of our tour! Fully laden we returned to our coach for the journey home.
A special thanks to our Banstead Coaches driver Chris who was ready at both venues with a large umbrella and a step board to get us safely over the puddles and in and out of the coach in the pouring rain.
It may well have been one of the wettest Cheam Probus outings but everyone had a really great time.
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