PAISLEY  in Renfrewshire, sits on the White Cart Water about 3 miles upstream from its confluence with the tidal River Clyde, and 7 miles south-west of Glasgow. The early flax trade was replaced by cotton goods. From the 17th century Paisley was engaged in trading coal and lime for trade and slate from the Highlands, and the burgh had a weekly market where farm produce and homespun cloth were bought and sold. The burgeoning textile industry in Paisley took off after the 1707 Act of Union introduced free trade with England. The earliest large-scale production was of coarse chequered linen and striped muslin. In 1726 the first mechanised flax mill was built in Paisley, and in 1759 the production of silk gauze started. The manufacture of shawls was begun in Paisley at the height of the muslin trade, in the 1770s, and shawls became the product for which the town was most famous, especially after a swirling pattern based on Kashmiri designs, later named 'Paisley pattern', was introduced to the town in 1805. By the 1790s cotton production was beginning to replace flax production, and in 1812 the first steam-powered thread mill was opened in Paisley, by William and James Carlisle. Steam-powered cotton mills were built across Paisley in the 1820s, and factories and premises associated with the textile industry, such as bleach fields and chemical plants, also proliferated. Perhaps the most famous works in Paisley were the Ferguslie thread mills of James Coats, built in 1826 to the west of the town. Coats was a name that became internationally synonymous with thread manufacture. Russian Lead flax bale seals have yet to be found here.

 Johnstone, nearby, had a Flax Mill on the Millbrae. There is a footbridge shown linking it to Barbush Flax Mill  on the north bank of the White Cart. Over the years both sites were owned by Finlayson, Bousfield and Co Ltd, the Linen Thread Co. Ltd and  Playtex. The site has been cleared and is no more.