#167: The story of Cumbrian iron

(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to Country Stride, the podcast dedicated to the landscapes, people and heritage of Cumbria and the Lake District. I'm here today in the North Lakes with author and illustrator, Mark Richards. Mark, how are you doing? - I'm very well. I've been responsible for my grandchildren, so that soaks up my time, adjoining this so-called holiday month, their parents being responsible for jobs. My wife and I have the occasional daily role of looking after them. - Well, this is one of the great joys of being a grandparent, of course, Mark. And what it does mean is I'm taking today's podcast, but we've got a guest who you know very well. We've been out with him, I think it's four times now. - Yes, we've been with Mark at four times. He has an in-depth knowledge of so many industrial, mine-oriented topics around the Lake District. - Well, never fails to enjoy conversations with him. - Absolutely, yeah, he's dedicated years of his life now to investigating the industrial history of Lakeland. As you say, mining, one of his great passions, as well as grave stones, actually. But today, we're talking about a topic we've not covered yet. What are we talking about today, Mark? - Well, Mark is taking us down the iron road, as it were, looking at the smelting of iron in different corners of the Southern Lake District. At its height, Cumbria produced more iron than anywhere else in the world. And it reaches its peak, actually, in the last century, when Mark would tell us towards the end of the episode, I think, if you sailed up the west coast, it looked like Cumbria was ablaze because of the furnaces, the coal mines were in operation. Barrow was an absolute powerhouse for the iron and steel industry, of course. But it starts many centuries before in the medieval times. I think what he's got planned for us today is a trip between three separate sites that are going to tell that long story from the medieval times, right up to today. Sites, he's got in mind and there'll be ones that you've been to, I'm sure you know. Tom Gill, just below townhouse. - Yes, I've been to Tom Gill and Tom Heights, which are quite a striking tourist location, so people will know of them as a scenic place. - Then we're going to go to Coniston, I think, and then down to the Dundblast furnace. I will go and meet up with Mark now, and we will delve into the deep history of the iron industry and the lake district. (upbeat music) (water splashing) It's a few weeks past midsummer, and I'm in Glen Mary, bottom of Tom Gill, on the road between Ambleside and Coniston. Beside the river here in beautiful woodland, below a sicken more, rowing above us as well, plenty of silver birch. And I'm in the company of an old friend of the podcast. It's Mark Hatton, Mark. Can you just introduce yourself to listeners who may not have heard your previous podcasts? - Thanks Dave, yeah, Mark Hatton. So I live in Ambleside. I'm a very keen industrial history person. I love unpicking the layers of industrial history that we have in the lake district. Trying to make sense of them, trying to understand the people, the process, the place that goes with all of that history. We've recorded, I think, four times with you in the past, Mark, and today's podcast fits into that wider industrial history. Perhaps you can place today's subject, which is the iron industry in Cumbria, into that historical context of what we've recorded with you before. - So what we've recorded before, I think we started with the graphite industry, the Wadmines of Seathwaite. We've talked about the Elizabethan mining period, which was largely focused around copper. We've talked about Coniston copper mines, which was Elizabethan, but largely a Victorian copper mining industry, and we've also visited the slate quarries, where it was an enormous business in exploiting the stone in the lake district. But now we're looking at iron. Iron is a product that appears very widely across the British Isles. But what we find in the lake district is the perfect combination of iron or availability, woodland availability, and water power availability. Our forefathers harness those three ingredients to make an iron industry that spans from the medieval to the modern, from the early stages of iron production in the Lakeland Fells, where it was used critically for farming implements and some weapons, through to the post-reformation 16th, 17th century, where we're seeing entrepreneurs coming into the market, producing bigger capital intensive industry to produce higher volumes, right food to the blasts furnaces of the 18th century, and then the massive furnaces of the 19th and 20th century, which dominate world production of iron and steel. And my passion is to help people understand that Cumbria and the Lake District is not about tourism. It's about the industrial heritage, making a living in the Lakeland Fells. Spot on great introduction, and overview to what we're talking about in that span of history. And towards the end of that period that you mentioned, Mark, Cumbria becomes the leading exporter of iron in the world, right? Yeah, in the early 20th century, Cumbria was the biggest producer of high quality steel in the world. Bowen furnace alone was the largest steel manufacturing plant in the world, producing really high quality steel from the very high quality hematite ores that we find in the furnace area. Let's just go back to basics, Mark. What is iron? Iron is all around us. Iron is one of the most common materials in the earth. You could say the earth is almost made of iron. And so it's very widely appearing. The technology necessary to smell iron and turn into a metal develops in the iron age. In Britain, that's about 1,000 BC. It generally presents in the earth, certainly in Cumbria, as an iron oxide known as hematite. The word hematite means blood rock or red rock, a chemo and anite, and that's because it's a very red material. The earliest use of iron wasn't as a metal. It was as a pigment. Hematite dust grounding it down made a very red pigment that was used by the Stone Age man. Some of the earliest cave paintings use hematite dust to get that really rich red ocherish color on the walls. The iron itself forms in the earth, but then it'll come to the surface and deposit large quantities of iron in the host rocks. And Cumbria has got one of the finest deposits of iron or anywhere in the British Isles. Where are you going to take us today, Mark? I know we've got an unusual setup. We're not going a single walk. We're driving around the South Lakes and we're going to visit three separate sites. Yeah, so where we are just now we're in an ancient woodland. And you might think, well, what's a woodland got to do with iron? Well, fundamentally the challenge in creating iron metal is the process of heating it, smelting it. And the fuel that was needed to do that was charcoal. So you bring the iron ore from the lowland coastal mines and all deposits into the inland woodland. So what we're going to look at here is one of the earliest bloomery forge sites to demonstrate how iron was first produced in the Lake District. We're going to then see how the bloomery's expand and become really industrial scale. And then we'll move down river as it were, down into the Dodden Valley, where there is a very large, the best preserved blast furnace, 18th century blast furnace site in the country. I've walked beside each of these sites and I don't think I've recognized what I've been seeing. So I cannot wait to dig into that history. Let's get on to the path. Let's rise up through these ancient woods and go and explore our first medieval bloomery. (water splashing) We've walked 400 yards up the woodland path here. Ultimately, of course, destination Tarnhaus. It's an oak woodland, absolutely beautiful. Quiet today, even though we're in the summer holidays, the stream beside us after so many weeks are very little in the way of rainfall. There's almost nothing in it now. And we're in an interesting spot here, which I'll describe further in a minute. But before we get to that mark, can you just put us into the deep historical context of where we are, where we first start to see these bloomeries emerging? What's been happening before? We're in the Stone Age, right? Yes, the Lake District is a very important place for stone tool production because we've got the Langdale Axis in the acts factories that span all the way. from Langdale across to Scarfell. In the stone age, the lake district stone is very highly prized because it's a stone, the green stone that can take an edge and it's about creating sharp edges for implements, for weapons and for farming implements and timber harvesting implements. We then jump over the bronze age, we've got no evidence of bronze age production of copper or tin being alloyed together to make bronze in the lake district and in fact we don't have any early iron age evidence here either. There might well have been early iron age production in Cumbria, the Vikings would have possibly done it but we don't see definitive evidence on the ground of that. The first documentary evidence we have of iron production is the monastic times, the post-Norman times when furnace abbey has arrived in Barrow area, furnace abbey stopped producing very detailed records of their revenue generating methods and iron production is an important part of that and where we're standing now is in a woodland that was owned by furnace abbey and they exploited this extensively to produce here charcoal is in the medieval period to the 12th 13th century where you are clearing large platforms stacking up cut timber covering that cut timber with some sort of cover like earth or clay creating effectively an oven around that timber lighting that and cooking the timber to turn it into charcoal. Charcoal is purified wood wood which has had all the moisture and other impurities cooked out of it to leave a pure carbon substrate which is like rocket fuel and you need that rocket fuel to get to the temperature necessary to smelt iron. The space we're standing in here two minutes walk really from the car park down on the road there and to all intensive purposes it looks like a flat woodland clearing what was going on on this site then Mark. Yeah so this is the sort of site you'd walk past and not give it a second look but this is a heavily managed site. Man have leveled this area have cleared it and have turned this into what we would now call a pitstead which is a flat charcoal burners platform. The stone work off to our right was probably arranged to be some sort of rudimentary dwellings because the charcoal burners are people living in the woods and they've got to manage their charcoal burning place for days on end. It's a 24 hour job but they've got to keep the temperature of the charcoal burning just right. Okay so let's go back in time then to this early medieval period and paint a little bit of a picture about what we can see here and how this industry is operating. So the first thing to say then picking up your earlier point the iron or itself is not found local to here. It's not in these woods it is transported here. We believe the earliest sources of the ore is down in furnace around what's now Dalton was called ore grave which means ore pit that grave being a pit. We've got documentary evidence of ore being exploited there from the 1100s so just after the Norman conquest. That ore is then bought up into these woodlands probably by Pony and maybe voted up Conniston water to bring the ore to this location because we're just a half a mile north of the end of the lake here bringing it into the woodland where the charcoal burners have produced the key ingredient necessary to turn the iron ore into iron metal. The reason you do it this way round rather than for example taking the timber down to the source of the ore itself. Yeah so it's easier to bring the ore to the fuel than take the fuel to the ore. Iron ore is very transportable while it's quite heavy it's not particularly bulky you don't need huge quantities of it and it's very resilient obviously you can't damage it whereas charcoal you need vast quantities of it and it's quite delicate actually charcoal if you handle it roughly it'll just powder so it was more practical to bring the heavy resilient ore in low volumes to the light but very high volume very delicate charcoal in the woods. In terms of painting this picture of what we might have seen at that time Mark you've pointed out the potential houses here and you're right there's a big pile of big boulders here all of course moss reclaimed now we would see fewer trees I guess because a lot of them will have been taken out we would see people chopping them down we would see piles of timber waiting to be made into charcoal and on this flat area here what do we see? We would see small groups of men or maybe one man working alone a charcoal burner managing the whole of this woodland space so he's collecting the wood he's drying the wood out by leaving it sheltered for a little while and then he's chopping that wood up into small segments and then stacking it up and then covering it over to allow it to be effectively an oven if the temperature is too low it won't produce charcoal but we're still if the temperature is too high it will destroy the wood and turn it into ash. Temperature management is a skill that requires a great deal of attention a great deal of knowledge and experience so that he's left with high quality charcoal to show his efforts rather than valuable ash and they would use makeshift screens to guard against the wind so they would weave panels of wicker hold those screens up to screen off the mound from the wind direction so that there's not so much wind blowing onto the mound that would get the temperature up and he's constantly trying to repair the outer surface of the mound so any wind can't get into the heart of the heap and the process of making this charcoal creates a raw material that is almost 100% carbon. Yeah very close to 100% carbon as we know when we're doing barbecues charcoal burns at very high temperatures and it's that temperature that you need to produce the iron. So we just step just a few yards from here we'll see where they produce the iron. Okay well let's walk together Mark you're going to guide the way so we've got the bed of the stream here crossing over that we've got a potentially a coppest beach or something similar here and I'm looking at something distinctive on the ground this is just above the bank maybe there's been some erosion to reveal some of the top soil but I think you'll probably tell me this has just been here for centuries what are we looking at Mark. So what we're standing on now is a medieval slag heap. What we see if we just look down at our feet we see melted rock, aerated rock, smooth, glassy material and this is a huge mound of it if you just get your eye in you'll see there is a pretty large mound of slag here and that's because this is where they've taken the charcoal to a bloomery site here still beside the little trickling water these early bloomries are not water-powered bloomries the hand-powered bloomries but what you're basically building is a sort of clay oven a chimney probably about 4 to 8 feet high and you're piling into that charcoal and you're lighting that charcoal and getting the charcoal up to a very high temperature and then you're introducing the iron ore you're putting the iron ore into the top of that chimney so it's resting on the very hot charcoal and then you'll pour some more charcoal on top of that and then you'll keep introducing more charcoal and some more iron ore over a period where that temperature is really building up and then once the temperature gets to a certain stage it will bloom the iron slag will run out to the bottom of this oven and become the liquefied rock that we see all around us that's the waste product and within that slag which is largely silica you've got all the impurities and left within the furnace itself is a bloom of iron and it's called a bloom because it literally sort of bubbles out like a flower opening and forms this sort of lump might only be a couple of kilograms of iron metal and you have to cool the furnace you'd use the water from the stream to douse the heat break it apart and then find in the middle of this half this bloom of iron so this process effectively melts the rock the big challenge in producing iron is getting the temperature up to the thousand plus degrees centigrade necessary to liquefy the impurities that are in the ore and to create the chemical reaction where the carbon takes up the oxygen from the ore how long would it take between the process of setting up this oven here and getting the bloom out the charcoal production process takes days to cook the timber to make it into charcoal the iron blooming takes hours now that iron has not been heated to sufficiently high temperature for it to take up any of the carbon in the charcoal so that iron comes out as sometimes called sponge iron but it's like a rot iron it's a low carbon iron which can then be taken to a forge to be reheated turned into molten metal or very hot metal so it can be shaped to make farming implements spades and your your rakes and your hose and your cloud tips this is a critical development in agriculture that you're using iron to create plows which plow way more effectively than wooden plows and this is the industry this is the site where iron is being first produced in the lake district wow okay and that process actually sounds very similar to the creation of lime in the lime kilns yeah absolutely charcoal and limestone are mixed together to use the lime that you need for all those purposes. So yes, these industries, and we've got lime kilns just down the road from here, reflect the fact that to make a living out of agriculture in the Lake District was very difficult. We've got very poor agricultural land, very limited, so people needed to be ingenious to find other ways to exploit the natural landscape, the water, the wood, and the ores that allow them to make a living in this really quite difficult environment. I made the point that I think we're probably bit side a historic copis here. Was this part of a sustainable woodland industry? Are they copicing or are they taking mature trees out? So the early medieval workings are taking out mature trees, and this becomes a major concern that the woodlands of South Lakes are being destroyed, they're being denuded. In 1564, there is a law passed that bans the use of woodland for this purpose. So in the coniston area, these bloomways all date before the 1560s because past that date, they were so worried about woodland destruction that they are basically outlawed it. Just describe a little bit what I can see here if any listeners want to try and find this. So again, if you come up the main track from the car park and you'll find an area that has not been vegetated with very odd looking what look like black stones until you get up close and personal and they've got all kinds of bubbles in them as you say these very smooth shapes as well. Once you've seen these, you will see them all over the place right now. You're right and the other way you can tell them is the noise they make because these are largely silica, which is what glasses and if you clunk them together, it sounds a bit glassy. It's smooth like glass and it bubbles like molten glass. And then mixed with it, you see all sorts of other impurities, bits of stone and even little lumps of charcoal sort of almost appearing hidden in it. This slag is everywhere in the lake district. Big mounds of slag or small mounds of slag tucked away in all the woodlands. There are 250 bloom recites have been recorded just in this area of southern lake district and there are probably hundreds more yet to be discovered. Okay, Mark, whether you've clearly explained then the first generation, if we can call them that, of these furnaces up here in the woods, we're now going to head a little bit further south. We're going to go to Coniston itself or just above it to talk about the next stage in the evolution of this industry. Well, it's the second stop on our journey through the south lakes and I'm in Coniston, in the heart of Coniston, just above, literally above, on a bridge, church, back, looking at the Ruskin Museum here. And I'm beside a series of houses, Mark will tell me that the clue is in the name. I'm looking at numbers two and three, the forge. And this is important, Mark, because what we're seeing here is the next generation of smelting. Yeah, where we've been in Tom Dill, we've seen a hand-powered bloomery where the water trickling past was just enough to wash the ore and douse the heat of the bloomery. The next generation starts harnessing rivers to power the bellows and then slightly later to power the hammers that are used to hammer the iron into shape. And this is an example of that because we're standing above church back, which is a reliable fast flowing water course. We were standing here in the middle of one of the deepest droughts, but I think the lake district has had for several years and yet you can still hear church back is flowing quite vigorously past us. That's enough of a flow to power water wheels. So what was developed here in the early 1600s was a bloom smithy, which means it's a bloomery still using charcoal in a similar sort of way, but on a larger scale because the size of the furnace can be greater because the bellows that are providing the air to get the temperature up are powered by water. That allows the production of iron here to be coming out in sort of 20 kilogram batches rather than say two kilogram batches in the hand bellows of a tom gill that we just saw earlier. And then a slightly later evolution is they use the same water power to power another water wheel that powers what's known as a tilt hammer, which is a big mechanical hammer that is lifted and then dropped, lifted and dropped. And that hammer is hammering that bloom of iron, knocking out any further impurities in it and knocking it into shape to make the tools, the weapons, the the implements that are the end product from the iron that is being produced here. Okay, so effectively in the old days we take our bloom to the local smithy here, everything's on the same site. It's an integrated process relying on water to scale it up. These are operating during the 1600s and then when we get into the 1700s the scaled up still further by producing large scaled blast furnaces, which is where we're going next. Let's carry on our journey. We'll leave Coniston. It's been a very brief visit, but we've enjoyed it nevertheless. Off we go down to the we've arrived in our third location. We're in a very narrow little wooded passage in woodland just above Dunbridge called furnace wood. Again, clue in the name there. There's a little bit of water falling in the background. It feels pretty overgrown here and we'll come on to talk about an absolutely intriguing feature at my feet, but before we get there I just want to have a bit of a geology chat mark. Iron, how does it form and where does it form in Cumbria? I'm not a geologist, so I've got to put a health warning on this, but my understanding is that so much iron, the earth is almost made of iron, but some of that iron has been mobilised and brought up to surface or subsurface areas of the crust of the earth in geological time, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago. There was a big deposit of iron shallow depths in what's now the Irish sea, but then some 10 millions of years ago there was a big heating event, probably a sort of volcanic or tectonic event that has taken that iron and has mobilised it. That iron is mobilised such that is flowed towards the west coast of Cumbria and then has re-deposited itself from the surface down. So imagine iron bearing liquids flowing across the landscape being absorbed into the landscape. Now, depending on the host rock, it is absorbed differently. On the sort of coastal area, the lowlands of this furnace area, the host rock is limestone and these superheated iron fluids are absorbed into that limestone and actually replaces the limestone. It displaces the limestone, melts it away and forms these big deposits of iron that were subsequently mined out of huge scale. As that liquid flows further inland it meets different rock by a day of volcanic and skidder measures and rather than displace that rock it just fills in any crevices or fractures in that rock forming seams or veins of iron. So the type of iron mining you get up S-gale where its veins is very different from around the lindal area where its huge deposits of iron strata that have been formed by displacing the limestone. So the deposits, as you say mostly on the coast, it does creep inland a little bit and you've mentioned S-gale there. Of course, ratty built for transporting the iron or out but that never really worked. The S-gale veins were not highly productive so the mining operations up S-gale were really largely lost making benches that didn't last very long. There was iron veins in Langdale and you can see iron in the landscape of the Lake District, anything with a red in its name, so red pike, red torn, red gill is because it's red earth which has gone iron content that makes it red. There are several red pikes, there's a red squeeze and there's several red taunts as well which shows just how much iron there is in the Lakeland landscape but often not at high enough concentrations to do anything other than colour of the earth. Now I teased out this detail at our feet here. What I'm looking at is cobbling still in remarkable shape and this tells us a story about transport. So the blast furnaces have an insatiable demand for charcoal and the whole hinterland around the blast furnaces is developed to supply that insatiable demand. There are a network of bridlepaths through these forests and woodlands which are veins leading from the pitsteads, the charcoal burning platforms that are dotted all around the woodlands, feeding that charcoal down these well-made pony tracks. So these would be pack horses coming down these cobbled lanes feeding down towards the blast furnace. Right, well we're gonna go and visit that blast furnace towards the end of the podcast. For now we're gonna carry on rising on this lovely, very, very old wooded trail and we're gonna go and visit one of these pit stents. Still plenty of autumn leaves on the ground of this time of year. We've only come a little bit further Mark and this will be a very short little bit of recording but we've stopped because of a beautiful little detail in the landscape. - Yeah, we're now in what you would call Holloway. This has seen so many feet, so many hooves and possibly cartwheels through this piece of the landscape that we've hollowed out this big, you-shaped groove. We've got a tree-lined bank on our right and we've got a tree-lined bank on our left and in the middle we've got a stoned trackway. It was a major thoroughfare in it today but is now sort of lost in the woods and barely remembered as a busy route through. I love a good Holloway. You'll find more of them in the south of England when you there's certain parts of the country where because of reasons of history and also topography they're really worn down. We don't have a huge number in Cumbria but this is one of them. We've risen further into Furnacewood. It's a beautiful oak woodland rising up the steep fell side. We've continued up this really old way. Lower down, choked with brambles, a feeling of nature moving back in onto this ancient path. Up here it's a bit more open. Got a more open canopy ferns on the understory. And Mark, you're going to tell me that what we can see ahead here is something extraordinary. To me it looks like a small grass-covered mound. Where we are now is where, right in the very heart of the woodland industry, the woodlands of Cumbria sustained many people producing many products from wood. Charcoal burning was a critical industry to supply the blast furnaces just like bark peeling was critical to supply the tanneries. Charcoal was also used in the gunpowder factories and obviously the wood itself was used by the bobbin mills. Copper saying was critical to the woodland management so you're not clear-felling the woodland. You're managing it to regenerate growth. And if we look around ourselves we can still see copper trees. Despite the fact that copper saying of these trees probably stopped a century ago, you can still see plenty of evidence of the shoots coming from a large trunk. One stem can grow a dozen or 20 other smaller stems. They're far easier to harvest because you can just cut through those very easily. Far easier to turn into charcoal because you've got small diameter wood. And you can sustain the woodland by copper saying indefinitely where clear-felling is on one off activity. Copper saying is a sustainable activity. We've walked past, although it's hard to see at this time of year because of the ferns, probably a dozen pit steds. Flat man-made platforms on which charcoal would be burned or bark peeling huts would have been constructed. We've come up high enough in the woodland here to get some nice light coming through the canopy so we can see the ground cover. And what I want to show you is that this inauspicious-looking bit of ground in front of us is actually a really historic remainder in the landscape of an industry that is largely forgotten today. OK, well, shall we walk up there now? Not much birds, not at this time of year. And we're coming up through some rough ground on to what's not going to describe. Semi-circular flat platform, 30 to 40 feet in diameter. And on this platform we can see the stone remains of a hearth. So that circular hearth there is the stone remains of a bloomery for producing the charcoal. And at the back we've got a structure that is either the remains of a hut or possibly the remains of a chimney where they would have made the hut out of wood. The only area they'd need to make our stone is the chimney at the back of the hut. This is a beautiful remainder that shows where they lived, how they worked, how they've left their footprints, their fingerprints on the landscape. Yeah, I mean, so this is far better preserved, isn't it, than the little platform we were on earlier, particularly, as you say, this potential stone heart or little bothe on the hillside. This was an operation for single people. You didn't have families up here, you just had men operating in the woods and they had different customers in a different times of the year. They're producing charcoal or they're doing bark peeling and they are doing the transport as well. They're carrying sometimes on their back, huge bags of charcoal. It's not heavy, but it's very, very bulky. And they're bringing back up with them. The food they need to sustain themselves in these places. They're long gone, but their footprint, as I say, remains in the landscape. And if you learn how to spot it, you can get great pleasure from feeling the industry and the humanity that made a living in this place. Let's pick up a little bit on these people. We've moved on from the dissolution now. So there's not a single owner of this area. How are these men operating? Are they self-employed? Are they employed by the smelter companies? So the lands of the Abbey, the monastic lands were seized by the crown and then were divvied out to local landowners. People who were in favor of the crown were gifted land or bought the land from the crown. And so you get multiple landowners who are then tasked with making income from their land. Now they would probably sublet big areas of woodland to men who would come in to do these industries. So the man who worked here probably had some sort of inform lease over a certain area of the woodland, few acres of woodland. And that was his patch where he could equal a living. He would pay a rent or royalty to the landowner. He found a way to make a living in these woodlands with the landowner above him and the downstream industries of the blast furnace that we're going to see next as his key customer. Let's drop down through the woods and discover the best preserved blast furnace in the UK. Still very dry everywhere. A little bit greener after a couple of days of rain. And we walked down the cobbled trackway that bought the charcoal down off the hill. And we're coming to I guess the next stage of evolution in the development of the iron industry in Cumbria. And wow Mark said this was going to look great and massively impressive. So we're overlooking a site now. A collection of buildings. I'm looking at something like four, five, six buildings. Stone built. Some of them have got roofs. Some have not. These are towering above our head. And I'm looking down to the bottom at what I guess is going to be the blast furnace itself. Mark, where are we and what are we looking at? So we're looking at a series of structures that were basically at this upper side of the site storerooms. Each of these storerooms is the size of a church because they are having to store vast quantities of charcoal. The really big buildings in front of us here are charcoal stores. And then a slightly smaller building in the middle here is an iron ore and a limestone store. And they're built deliberately uphill from the blast furnace. So all of the materials coming out of the woodland are delivered to the back of these charcoal stores. All the paths through the woodlands converge at the back of these charcoal stores. And charcoal is loaded into these buildings from the upslope. And then the iron ore and the limestone is coming up the river, doesn't. Surprising that it was a navigable river up until just below the bridge because it was dredged. And then they would come up this wide trackway and loaded into the iron ore and limestone store in front of us. The volume mix is you need 10 times the volume of charcoal to one times the volume of iron ore and limestone which is why these charcoal stores are enormous. Limestone has not been mentioned yet on the podcast so far as part of this process. So what's happened to mean that we've got limestone coming in here? A bloomery is what's known as self-fluxing. You don't need to introduce a flux or the carbon, the charcoal itself serves as the flux. When you're using a blast furnace, you're operating on a completely different scale at much higher temperatures than the bloomery and you introduce limestone to the mix to act as a flux. A flux takes up the impurities, takes up the material that you want to get rid of from the iron, leaving you with the pure pig iron that we'll see in a minute when we go down to the furnace. We're going to walk down here. First, visit to the charcoal store rooms with this huge amount of storage space. We should say we're the only people here, Mark. Does it get busy this site? I mean, I've never really heard of it. No, this site is not as well known as you might expect it to be. Well, we've been tucked away. We're just around the corner from Dodden Bridge. So there's a very busy road for a few hundred yards from here but not many people turn up this side and when they do, the dudden furnace doesn't announce itself particularly loudly. There is a small car park, a free car park beside it. There was a big project here, I think, about 30 years ago to conserve this site, but I actually don't think it's really caught on on this sort of public consciousness, this is a really interesting site to visit. We've walked into what you described as the church-sized storeroom. You're right. I mean, what are we looking at? 40 feet, 50 feet high? Yeah, all of that. It's about 50 feet high and probably about 150 feet long. It's an enormous storeroom, and this is only one of several storerooms. Interestingly, if you look at the wall of this storeroom, you'll see the stone has been badly deformed, and that's because there was a fire here, quite disastrous fire here at some stage in the 1700s, and the temperature that the charcoal burnt at was enough to almost melt the stones, which is slate, at the side of this, to melt slate needs extraordinarily high temperatures. So I'm sure that was a huge setback for this, but they've bounced back from that. This site was first opened in the 1730s. It was a joint venture between the Backbarrow Blasphonus Company, just on the River 11th, south of Windermere, and the Kunzi Blasphonus Company. Both of those blast furnaces had been opened in the 1710s, and couldn't keep up with demand, so they created a joint venture to build this one in the 1730s. The blast furnaces that were built around about this time in the late district, so you've got Backbarrow and Kunzi with the first two, then Dutton and Nibthweight, just further up the creek, were built in the 1730s. You had Newland, Lowwood and Pennybridge, Blasphonus was being built in the 1740s. So there was a collection of similar setups using water power to power big bellows, producing really large volumes of what's known as pig iron. And what's driving this explosion in demand? The Industrial Revolution. We are entering into the 18th and running into the 19th century. Demand for iron is growing at a pace. That's feeding all of the industrial processes that need iron for machinery and for tooling and for building and for rail lines bit later on. Obviously, iron ships, iron chains, iron anchors. Now you've mentioned the scale mark, and it is phenomenal here. If I imagine all of the charcoal tipped in here from above, as you said, piled up absolutely monstrous amounts. But this is partly because they cannot afford to run out. That's right, so the way a Blasphonus operates is it's a continuous process. For months and months on end up to 18-20 months, this blast furnace would be in blast, which means it's being maintained at a constant temperature with charcoal and iron being constantly added to the mix. We'll see in a moment how they added it. But if they ever run out of the raw materials and the blast furnace can't be kept in charge, then that's a hugely expensive process for it to cool down and the iron within it to set. To get it restarted again is very expensive, very difficult to do, very inefficient. So they want to ensure they've got enough charcoal in particular, because that's the critical raw material, they can buy in iron ore very reliably. The charcoal industry struggles to keep up with demand. They enter into all sorts of imaginative arrangements to try and keep the supply of charcoal up, but ultimately the best defense against the shortage of charcoal is to have a lot in stock. We should mention that all of these businesses subsequently look to Scotland as a source of charcoal, but then they realise that the charcoal doesn't travel very well, so they all build blast furnaces up in Scotland, which is why you see them at lock-or, you see them on lock-fine, and it's the Cumbrian companies that are building the blast furnaces up in Scotland. They're exporting the iron ore from furnace up to Scotland to meet the charcoal. It's all sailed up, you can take big bulk quantities of iron ore up by ship and offloading it on lock-fine or lock-or, and they are the huge forests in Scotland are then being managed for the charcoal to fuel those furnaces. Wow, right, okay, and the coast is huge important for that, isn't it? You've got that direct west coast route that's going to take you up the sea logs. Yeah, you know, Barrow in Furness is transformed from being a really small community to a thriving industrial town during these years, you know, the late 1700s and into the 1800s, and shipbuilding becomes a big industry in Barrow in Furness to ship the iron ore. Again, it's where one industry creates and feeds another industry, and you know, you still see the remains of those today with the submarine building at Barrow in Furness, started off building ships of the iron ore industry. We will leave the charcoal storage house, this abandoned church, we're walking past on our right, yeah, this little limestone and iron ore storage unit as well, and I can see ahead of me now, Mark, it's a tower rising up several stories with a kind of drawbridge leading up to it. What am I looking at? So what we're entering now is the charge house. The charge house is where they mix together the right quantities of charcoal and limestone and iron ore, and just to be clear on that, it's the same process we spoke about earlier on. It's very much the same process, but this has been done at a much bigger scale, so you've got big wheelbarrows, you've got big baskets, men constantly working here, feeding this behemoth of a furnace, and what we're looking at is we're looking at, as you call it, a drawbridge, it's a rising bridge up to the mouth of the side of this chimney stack, that's where we're going to be taking the charcoal and the iron ore on the limestone, and pouring it into the mouth of this furnace. Okay, well we're just going a little bit further to the top of the furnace here, and we've got this opening, it's boarded up now. Yeah, so if we look in here, we're looking into a basically a chimney stack. The chimney rises up above us, and this is venting off the very hot gases that are coming out of the furnace, and these are poisonous gases, these are carbon monoxide coming out of here, so you definitely need to tip your product into this chimney quickly, and then get away to breathe some fresh air, and that was always a danger for the charging hands who are putting this material into here, if they got a good lung full of carbon monoxide, it would damage them very quickly. Okay, we're going to carry on, take the mic with us down the ramp, and we're going to look at what's happening down below 50-60 feet, we're going to talk a little bit about this remarkable void that we're looking at here, it's an archway isn't it, stone covered, it's the slate again, what are we looking at? So we're looking at the furnace itself, we're looking here through the casting arch to our right around the other face of this square block, is the blowing arch, you can see the thickness of the walls of this furnace, they're about 20 feet thick, and if we step into the casting arch and look up, we can see the very heart of the furnace above us. As we look up there, we're looking up to, you can see daylight coming down this chimney, you can see the furnace bricks that are surrounding this big cone, if we were standing here, when this blast furnace would be in operation, we wouldn't be here for very long, because we'd be incinerated in seconds, because we're talking of temperatures well over 1,200 degrees in here, you've got layers of charcoal and iron ore above us, sinking into the hot, half that we're standing in, and then iron is melting and running out through the casting arch into a set of beds that look a little bit like a cell feeding the piglets, they run into these little sort of cell-shaped depressions, and that's why it's called pig iron, and out of the other arch, we can see the remains of what was the blowing house, and that's what we need to understand. To get the temperature in here right, you need to be constantly blasting air into here, that blast is achieved by a large set of bellows, a pair of bellows, so one is pushing air in, while the other is effectively inhaling, and then whilst the other one is exhaling, the other one is inhaling, so there's a constant blast, not a sort of in-out, a constant pushing of air into here, to power those huge bellows, you need a very large water wheel, and to power very large water wheel, you need a very large and reliable supply of water. Let's go and have a look at that now. Okay, so we're walking out, past the platforms where the bellows would have stood, and a reminder of where we are geographically, so we've got the dudden rising in Moesdale, if we've been up there to the source of it in previous podcast, presumably the leads taken a little bit of the dudden. If we walked up the river dudden from here, almost half a mile, we'd come to the remains of an old weir, which was where the water was taken out of the main river system, and then fed along a long water system, a man-made water system, to bring it from up river across the hillside and then feeding it down to the furnace, and what we're standing beside now is a deep wheel pit, so there would have been a large water wheel in this wheel pit. This wheel is driving a drive shaft, which is the power source for the big bellows that are blasting air into the furnace. Unless just cast our mind back to the second location we've visited today, Coniston, beside Church Beck there. That used a water wheel and a reliable water source, but this is on a whole different scale. Yeah. The River Doddon is a fast and furious river that never runs dry and they exploited that water here just like they did at the other blast furnaces at Backbarrow, which is using the River Leaven, low water also uses the River Leaven, nipthwaite, penny bridge are using the River Crake running out of Coniston. These blast furnaces are moving to where the water is efficient and powerful enough to operate. Okay, let's talk about the onwards journey. So another thing that's different about this site is there's no blacksmith on site. The raw material isn't getting made into tools and whatever here, is it? Because these furnaces work at higher temperatures, the actual chemistry in them is different from a bloomery. A bloomery, the temperature doesn't get up high enough for the carbon to be absorbed into the iron, so you're producing low carbon iron. And that can be wrought straight away. It can be turned on an anvil into the tools that you need to sell to market. These blast furnaces operated a higher temperature and therefore the iron will absorb some of the carbon. And the pig iron is like cast iron. It's a brittle iron. It does have some applications. Some structural applications that don't put a bend on the iron can use cast iron, pots and pans use cast iron, pipes use cast iron because they're not subject to tensile forces. But if you want to make chains and you want to make ships and you want to make structural beams to hold up tower blocks and what have you, you need to turn it into wrought iron. And that's where this cast iron, this pig iron, is shipped away. The main customer for here for many years was actually Bristol. It shipped down from the Dodden and the Green Odd Port, out down the Irish Sea down to Bristol, where it would then go through a forging process, where it would be hit with big hammers to drive out the carbon and turn it into wrought iron that can then be made into chain was the main output of those Bristol factories. Mark, I think we have a little bit of a further warp. Perhaps get a grand picture of this site. And we can talk about the closing era of iron here and actually the growth of the great industries on the west coast as well. We've stepped back a few paces. We're by the information panel here. With this macro view of a site that, yeah, never been to before, it's mightily impressive. You wanted to point out a little detail here, briefly. So there's this lovely interpretation board. It's slightly faded now, but hopefully it will be renewed in the not too distant future. It's worth pointing out that the frame that this display board, interpretation board is made of, is made out of Dodden pigs. So that lump of iron that forms the top of the frame is a pig. It's come out of this furnace that's got the Dodden name embossed on it. A classic example of what would have been shipped from here. This site would have shipped away hundreds of tons a month, maybe 1,000 and 1,500 tons a year. When we're getting into the mid 19th century, so the very heart of the Industrial Revolution, where we're getting steam trains and railway tracks and iron ships powered by steam, the demand for iron has now grown to a whole greater scale. And these furnaces are now being replaced by the massive furnaces on the coast. So Barrow iron works had 10 furnaces side by side, Ascam, Millam, Wilkington, Maryport, all of those furnaces operating on the coast, but they operate differently from here because they're coke powered furnaces. Coke being, Coke is to coal, what charcoal is to wood. You've cooked it, you've put it through an oven to heat out the impurities, the moisture, the ingredients that you don't want, leaving you pure carbon behind. It's a highly calorific, fuel efficient material that can be powering the much bigger furnaces that we find on the coast. You have a dog joining the conversation in the background. When do we see the end of this amazing furnace mark? Late 1850s, this furnace comes from an end, so it's opened in the 1730s. It's running for well over a century into the 1850s, and then that's the time when you're opening the big furnaces on the coast. And also the same decade that Henry Bessemer comes up with his Bessemer Converter, which is converting iron into steel in a big volume cost-effective way. It's that steel that is produced in the Bessemer Converters and going through the rolling mills that is powering the shipbuilding industries, the construction industries, and the rail industry. Rail lines produced on the west coast of Cumbria were being delivered all over the world to build rail tracks for America, and India, and Africa, and everywhere else. Fast forward to now, all of the iron industries got. Cumbria, once the greatest producer in the world, we are no more. But at its height, it was extraordinary what was being produced here. Yeah, Cumbria was producing one million tons of steel and iron a year. If you were sailing down the Irish Sea in the early part of the 20th century, it looked like Cumbria was on fire, because you could see the flames, the massive heat being generated at Mary Porton at work, and at Millerman at Askum and at Varron Fernos. The iron mines and the coal mines were feeding this industry. But when becoming into the 1960s, the mines are starting to close, both the coal mines and the iron mines are running out of material, and the blast furnaces are going quiet and cold. Mark is being a great three-site walk and talk today. You've bought this lost history to life. I recommend a visit, particularly here. It's absolutely wonderful. We've put all of the details on the website itself, so you can see where to park up and where to come. And where to support this incredible heritage site. Thanks, Mark, as ever. A lovely, lovely walk. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it. Johnny's End, and we're back together again, Mark. I had a good time with Mark, other Mark, as ever, an absolute mine, as it were, of information. You're stealing my thunder here. I was going to come in that one. Sorry. Yeah, it was great. I do recommend a visit to that last furnace. It's amazing. It's like a cathedral, really. And one of the most amazing sites there is this whole wall where the slate has melted because of this fire. There was a historic fire there where the charcoal sat light. To melt slate. Isn't that incredible? I've never heard of such a notion. Yeah, over 1,000 degrees. That's what we're talking about here. And you can see this whole area of the wall, where it's just all congealed into this kind of dripping, spiny surface. It's absolutely extraordinary, as is the rest of the site. And of course, yeah, I mean, we've been down there on country stride before. Haven't we areas all around there? But the woods there are lovely as well. Or those sort of areas, sort of forgotten Lakeland or forgotten Cumbria. And there are so many of these industrial places that are really worth going to see. I've got a good friend who loves going to Dofton, and you can go to Great Rundale, which is a valley that nobody ever goes to, but it was had an industrial pass. Where's Great Rundale? It's behind Dofton Pike. Okay, and that's mining, presumably, is it lead? Yeah, it's lead mining was a hive of industry, as it were. And it's totally forgotten. Yeah, well, that was the other thing that was so amazing today. You know, we went to these old pit steds that have been flattened in the woods, where they're doing their charcoal burning or bark peeling, all these historic woodland industries. More than 200 sites already identified, and Mark thinks there's hundreds more. The trails through the woods, one of them was incredible, a hollow way through the woods, with still the original cobbling down there. Reclaimed by nature now, those brambles everywhere, moss on everything, but at one time he paints this picture of a network of trails running through the woods, and it would have been busy. When you realise the sheer number of people involved with these processes, who will have lived close by and dear and nature are there now to reclaim this setting, and we are so blessed to have somebody like Mark, to bring us into that world that is otherwise gone. Yes, hope we can get him back for future podcasts as well. We'll do our regular housekeeping, we are on episode number 167. For 166 previous episodes, dub dub dub, country stride.co.uk. If you would like to support us, you can do so in one of three ways. You can buy our guide books, you can find all of them at dub dub dub.country stride.co.uk. You can tell any family members or friends who have a passion for their lakes, about this podcast and spread the word. Or, and what we appreciate most of all, you can support us via Patreon, for as little as £3 a month you can join. join the network. very throng of listeners who give us a little bit of money that allows us to keep coming out to record these episodes, which does take money and time. And we'll sign off, Mark, by just reminding listeners that both you and I have new books out or coming out. Yours is out. Congratulations, it looks absolutely fabulous. Very briefly. What is it? It sounds very arrogant, but the book is called Best Walks in the Lake District. But actually, if you love the fells, this is the book to go. It's not a peak bag as book, it's about what a really good fell days. And there's 50 of them. There we go. So that's Mark's new book and my new book coming out soon is The Successor to Amy Bateman's 40 Farms, and it's called 40 Fells with Beautiful Photography by Tom McNally and Words By Myself about 40 amazing fells in the Lake District in Incombrough. Perhaps we'll talk more about that in the future. But anyway, Mark and I, both with new titles out at the moment, I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Mark, I think we're hopefully going up gable. Yes, indeed. And I gather you've got the diary dates for two guests to really superb guests. Unfortunately, that particular day, I've got to go to a funeral. My spirit will be with you when you're up on the great napes and with great company. Can't wait. Yep, that should be good and we can have a good old chat about what great gable means to you afterwards as well. I know it's one of your favourite fells and indeed, one of the walks in your new book goes all around the girdle there, doesn't it? So we'll have a chat about that when the time comes. But for now, good see you, Mark, and we'll be back together again for the next Country Strind. [Music]