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Four Parishes Research into the Iron Ore Industry
Iron Ore Production
We know in the woods around Billingsley, Chorley and Kinlet, ironstone was being mined and turned into bars of iron. This production of iron was done at furnaces called bloomeries. We can identify these because of the waste slag that they create; large piles of this still survive. We know of two particularly well-preserved sites, one between Billingsley and Chorley in the Deserts Wood and the other between Rays Farm and Kinlet. Both of these lie on streams and this is no co-incidence. We think that the water was used to power bellows and work hammers. At a bloomery, the ironstone was heated with charcoal until it became hot enough for the impurities to melt. These could then be drained off. However the iron itself never properly melted, instead forming a spongy mass in the bottom of the furnace. This was removed and was hammered until it formed a wrought iron bar called a bloom. This could then be used by blacksmiths.
Although we know the approximate sites of our two ironworks, we really have little idea about how exactly they worked. We do not know where precisely the furnaces were or how the bellows and hammers were worked by the water. It is possible that the water-powered bloomeries that we can now see were originally worked by hand, but this needs to be investigated. We do not know who owned the bloomeries or what quality of iron they produced. Perhaps the biggest gap of all is that we do not know when the bloomeries worked. A small amount of medieval pottery has been found on the two sites, but that is only of very limited use for dating the works.
The project will try and answer these questions by mapping the surviving earthworks and carrying out geophysical surveys. Devotees of TV archaeology programmes will know all about “geophys”. By measuring differences in electrical and magnetic fields, we can learn what is buried underground without ever having to dig. This is particularly important as out ironworks are in Sites of Special Scientific Interest and so our ability to excavate will be very limited. However, by using geophysics and by chemically analysing the slag we hope we can discover how the furnaces worked. Finally, to test our theories, we will reconstruct a bloomery and try and make our own iron.