The mill and its extensive site has been the centre of activity for Guardbridge for 135 years, but today its machinery is still and members of senior management, and the KPMG team, are attempting to salvage what they can from a situation that has already seen 180 of the 260 employees made redundant.

Mr Nimmo said today that the existing management had not been doing anything terribly wrong, but found external factors contriving against them.

He said, though, that there is currently no party interested in buying the company as a going concern, and Curtis had been operating in a difficult market.

There would be very few, if any, purchasers for the company in its present guise, he said, and it is thought that it would be very difficult to market the whole business as a going concern.

The administrators, he said, would not be making 180 redundancies if they thought there was a strong chance, but they were still trying to make the opportunity available, and were not about to tear everything down.

Mr Nimmo said that the main focus now is to maximise the position from stocks and debtors,

If the administration does move move into an asset recovery exercise, said Mr Nimmo, the administrators would have to see if there is interest in parts of the business, or whether there would be complete closure and alternative uses for the property.

Both management and workers had said they were deeply unhappy at the way things at the factory have been handled by the administrators.

This morning, however, managing director Keith Chapman was more hopeful.

He said that the main focus now is to press on to find someone to buy the business.

He said that other parties, key players in the paper sectors, had already been in touch, and he would be sharing the information with KPMG and they would be pursuing it.

Mr Chapman said he had received a lot of telephone calls from major customers within and outside the UK saying that they would leave business with the mill if it can be revived.

“More than that, they would also give us more business to try to secure the position” he said.

Mr Chapman also made it clear that there had been movement in the situation regarding wages that had led to him leading a short sit-in on behalf of employees.

He said that KPMG have arranged for people from the Department of Employment to come on site next week to process all the necessary forms to make sure the employers get whatever they are owed in terms of back pay and redundancy pay within the statutory limits.

Mr Chapman, who was one of those who lost his job, had been outspoken in his criticism of KPMG.

He made it clear his view was that the move into administration was premature and short-sighted, and there had been interest from other paper makers.

KPMG, however, said Blair Nimmo and Gary Fraser had been appointed by the directors of Curtis Fine Papers as joint administrators.

Mr Nimmo said, “Following significant losses in recent years, there had been an improvement in trading over the last year. Despite this, a number of external factors acted against the business, including significant increases in energy and raw material costs and a general decline in the availability of credit.

“In addition, the company had planned to sell a surplus area of land to raise funds.

“However, this was not possible following the difficulties currently being experienced by the real estate markets.

“The company explored several opportunities to sell the business, but these were not successful.”