300px|thumb|Bleekveld in een dorp (Bleachfield in a village), circa 1650 (Jan Brueghel the Younger) A bleachfield or bleaching green was an open area used for spreading cloth on the ground to be purified and whitened by the action of the sunlight. Bleaching fields were usually found in and around mill towns in Great Britain and were an integral part of textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution.
300px|thumb|Bleekveld in een dorp (Bleachfield in a village), circa 1650 (Jan Brueghel the Younger) A bleachfield or bleaching green was an open area used for spreading cloth on the ground to be purified and whitened by the action of the sunlight. Bleaching fields were usually found in and around mill towns in Great Britain and were an integral part of textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution.
When cloth-making was still a home-based occupation, the bleachfields could be found on Scottish crofts and English farm fields. Just as wool needed fulling and flax needed retting, so did the semi-finished fabrics need space and time outdoors to bleach. In the 18th century there were many linen bleachfields in Scotland, particularly in Perthshire, Renfrewshire, in the Scottish Lowlands, and the outskirts of Glasgow. By the 1760s, linen manufacture became a major industry in Scotland, second only to agriculture. For instance, in 1782 alone, Perthshire produced of linen, worth £81,000 (£ as of ).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).