Clean water was needed for processing the cloth. This was captured from field drainage on the hillside opposite and stored in a lodge on the farther side of the river, piped across when required. The water wheel, and later the engine condenser, could use the then highly polluted water from the River Ogden: a weir was placed 800m upstream and the water diverted into a long canal-like lodge that finished at the mill. Having passed over the pitch-back wheel, the water passed through a culverted tail goit back into the Ogden.
