Although they are far from their ancestral lands — the dry, windy plateaus of the Andes — alpacas seem content with life in the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, as they chew the cud and watch the world go by. Gentle creatures, they comfort each other by humming and tend to lie down if confused or frightened.

First imported to the UK in significant numbers in 1996, there are now around 25,000 alpacas country-wide, and a well-established network of owners’ groups under the umbrella of the British Alpaca Society (www.bas-uk.com).

Oxfordshire herds include Kilnwood Alpacas of Little Tew, Imagine Alpacas, near Horton-cum-Studley, and Great House Alpacas in Great Milton.

The main commercial reason for keeping alpacas is for their wonderful wool, which is soft and lustrous and comes in more than 20 natural colours.

It is finer than most sheep’s wool and contains no lanolin, making it suitable for people who are allergic to sheep wool or just find it uncomfortable against the skin.

Most alpacas are sheared yearly, in early summer. Some alpaca farmers spin their own wool but around 70, from Oxfordshire and as far away as Devon, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, now send their fleeces to Hagger’s Mill in Bodicote, near Banbury.

For mill owner Richard Hagger it all started in 2003 when he went to an alpaca open day “just for something to do” and got talking to several alpaca owners about what they did with their fleeces. He had a particular reason for asking.

Mr Hagger explained: “I was raised in the family woollen mill in Morley, near Leeds in Yorkshire but we had to sell up in the 1960s, like many family mills.”

At the open day Mr Hagger realised that here was a chance to use his in-depth knowledge of wool production in a new way.

There was undoubtedly a gap in the market for a small, specialist mill that would spin alpaca fleece into yarn for knitting or weaving into clothes and other textiles.

Mr Hagger bought the machinery from yet another mill that was closing down in Huddersfield and transported it to Oxfordshire, opening for business in December 2003.

Although made in the 1970s, the machines are still going strong, thanks to regular repair and maintenance by engineer Bob Davis, who previously worked at Early’s blanket mill in Witney.

Each bag of fleece that arrives at Hagger’s Mill is first fed into a machine called a fearnought that blends it and teases it apart, then into a carding and scribbling machine that further straightens, combs out and aligns the fibres using huge rollers covered in tiny metal spikes. It then winds the as-yet-untwisted strands, called ‘slubbing’, onto bobbins.

Mr Hagger has updated this machine with the one electronic component he feels is genuinely useful, rather than a mere novelty —an infra-red sensor that sounds an alarm if there is a break in the fibres as they are drawn from the fleece.

The bobbins are transferred from the carding and scribbling machine to the spinning ‘mule,’ a frame of spindles that can spin up to 350 threads at a time.

“It is a direct descendent of the spinning jenny,” said Mr Hagger, referring to a key invention of the Industrial Revolution, which greatly increased production in the cotton mills of northern England.

Having been spun, the single thread is moved to a machine that twists the threads around each other to become two, three or four-ply yarn, as required.

It emerges from this as 72 inch hanks which are washed to ‘set the twist’ so the wool lies properly and does not unravel as it is being made up.

The yarn is now ready to be knitted or woven into finished products by other companies.

Hagger’s Mill operates a small shop on site where there is a display of the many different things that can be done with alpaca fleeces.

Samples include beautiful rugs, throws and scarves; fine suiting material; wool for hand-knitters, and even a prototype square of Wilton carpet, which may be a good use for coarser quality wool.

“People who have used alpaca yarn are very happy with it,” Mr Hagger said.

At present, the UK’s alpaca-processing industry is small in scale. But some people are becoming more curious about the provenance of their clothes and household textiles, just as they have become interested in where their food and drink comes from.