Douglastown is a hamlet in Kinnettles in Angus, Scotland, three miles south-west of

Forfar Forfar ( sco, Farfar, gd, Baile Fharfair) is the county town of Angus, Scotland and the administrative centre for Angus Council, with a new multi-million pound office complex located on the outskirts of the town. As of 2021, the town has a pop ...

. It takes its name from the landowner who in about 1789 provided land for James Ivory & Co. (in which Mr Douglas was a partner) to build a

flax mill Flax mills are mills which process flax. The earliest mills were developed for spinning yarn for the linen industry. John Kendrew (an optician) and Thomas Porthouse (a clockmaker), both of Darlington developed the process from Richard Ar ...

to spin yarn for heavy linen cloth called osnabruks (named from the German town of Osnabruk, where it was originally made. The hamlet of Douglastown was built to house the workers. The mill closed in 1834. It used flax-spinning technology invented by

John Kendrew Sir John Cowdery Kendrew, (24 March 1917 – 23 August 1997) was an English biochemist, crystallographer, and science administrator. Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz, for their work at the Cavendish La ...

and Thomas Porthouse of Darlington,

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

ed in 1787. Douglastown near Forfar

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