ONE of television’s most familiar faces has spoken of the impact visiting Quarry Bank had on him as he filmed an episode of his new series.

Alan Titchmarsh visited the industrial mill and estate for an episode of Secrets of the National Trust to be aired on Channel 5 on February 28.

“Before I was born, my mum worked in a woollen mill near Ilkley in West Yorkshire, so I got a strange frisson about going into Quarry Bank,” he said.

“There’s the most heart-rending letter there from a man in Manchester who wanted to send his two young daughters to the mill’s Apprentice House because he was on his uppers.

“He saw young girls on the streets and wrote: ‘They are worth no more than the dirt beneath my feet, I don’t want this to happen to my daughters.’ As a father of daughters, that was quite harrowing.”

The National Trust has opened its doors to Channel 5 for the series, which started earlier this month. It celebrates the estates, historic houses and miles of breathtaking countryside and coastline in the conservation charity’s care.

Across six, 60-minute episodes, Alan Titchmarsh finds out about the trust’s conservation work and discovers the stories hidden behind its buildings and gardens.

He is joined by a team of National Trust specialists who will showcase new discoveries, inspiring conservation work and fascinating archives.

The episode about Quarry Bank tells some of the human stories that took place in what was one of the world’s first factories and an engine of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

It uncovers the stories of the child workers, some as young as eight, who were sent to the factories by parents who couldn’t afford to keep them and he’ll reveal the harsh and dangerous conditions they had to live and work in.

Alan said: “The machinery at Quarry Bank is incredibly powerful. There is one piece of machinery that is about 75ft (23m) long and winds cotton onto bobbins. It marches towards you.”