Iron.
In our tour of the lake we have noticed that there are remains of old iron works along its margin, now difficult to trace.
In High Furness, the district of which Coniston Lake is the centre, and the most northern part of Lancashire, there are about thirty known sites where iron was smelted in the ancient way with charcoal, producing a bloom—the lump of metal made by blowing in the furnace—whence the name bloomeries. Of these sites about half are in the valley of Coniston, and eight are actually on the shore of the lake:—
| Beck-leven (below Brantwood) | East side. |
| Parkamoor Beck (below Fir Island) | " |
| Selside Beck (below Peel Island) | " |
| Moor-gill (above Sunny-bank) | West side. |
| Harrison Coppice (opposite Fir Island) | " |
| Knapping-tree (opposite Fir Island) | " |
| Springs (opposite Beck-leven) | " |
| Waterpark (below Coniston Hall) | " |
All these have been bloomeries of a somewhat similar kind, and on Peel Island some iron works have been carried on of a rather different type, and perhaps at a different period. Small bloomeries have also been in blast at Tom-gill (the beck coming down from the Monk Coniston Tarns, often called Glen Mary), and at Stable Harvey in Blawith. One is said to be at the limekiln in Yewdale. There were two bloomeries of the later and larger type at Coniston Forge (up stream from the church) and at Low Nibthwaite, and two others further down the Crake, making sixteen in all the valley now known. There are, of course, many beside in the Lake District, as in other parts of the country.
That there were iron works before the Conquest in Furness appears from the place-name of "Ouregrave" in Domesday, which must be identical with Orgrave. At this place, early in the thirteenth century, Roger of Orgrave gave Furness Abbey the mine "cum ... aquæ cursu ad illam scil. mineriam lavandum," a grant confirmed by his son Hamo in 1235 (Coucher Book of Furness, p. 229). About 1230 Thomas le Fleming gave them iron mines in Elliscales. By 1292 a great part of their income was derived from iron works.
Canon Atkinson, in his introduction to the Coucher Book of Furness, c. xviii., reckoned that they must have had some forty hearths to produce the iron they made. When the wood near the mines was exhausted, it became easier to carry the ore to the place where charcoal was burned than to bring the charcoal—so much greater in bulk—to the ore. An acre of forest was not enough to supply charcoal for smelting two tons of metal, and so the woods were gradually devastated over a wider and wider area.
In 1240 the abbey, which owned the eastern side of the lake, but not the lake itself, got leave from the baron of Kendal to put boats on the lake of Coniston for fishing and carrying. The carrying was chiefly of timber for building, but the tops and branches were no doubt used for charcoal. That on the other shore the smelting works were creeping up the valley is seen from the grant, before 1282, of William de Lancaster to Conishead Priory of the dead wood in Blawith for charcoal to supply the canons' bloomeries—for it was not only Furness Abbey that dealt in iron; and, indeed, more bloomeries exist on the side that did not belong to the abbey than on the shore that did. Thus in the thirteenth century we infer that smelting went on by Coniston Lake shore well up the west side.
On the east side there is a remarkable coincidence between the sites of Furness Abbey "parks" (or early clearings for sheep farms) and the bloomeries we find there. Near Selside Beck, where slag has been found, is Waterpark—anciently Water-side-park, apparently the earliest of the abbey sheep farms. Above Parkamoor Beck bloomery is Parkamoor—the sheep farm on the moor. Above Beck-leven bloomery is Lawson Park, the latest of the Furness Abbey sheep farms. I think the inference is that when the land was cleared they put sheep on it, and went up the lake to the next beck for the site of their bloomery. What we know for certain is that in early times the valley of Coniston was thickly wooded, but by the time of the dissolution of the monastery, High Furness had been nearly denuded of timber.
After the dissolution of the monastery, the commissioners of Henry VIII. let part of the woods of Furness Fells to William Sandys and John Sawrey, to maintain three smithies, or combined smelting and hammering works, for which the rent was £20. Less than thirty years later, in 1564-5, these were suppressed, because it was represented that the woods were being wasted, and the £20 rent was thenceforward paid to the lord of the manor by the customary tenants as "bloomsmithy rent."
The tenants of High Furness were allowed to make iron for themselves with the loppings and underwood, which may account for some of the small bloomeries. But by this time an improved and larger furnace was beginning to come into fashion, and in the seventeenth century we find that one such existed at Coniston at the Forge, between the Black Bull and Dixon Ground. It is mentioned in 1650 by the German miners, and by Sir Daniel Fleming in 1675. In 1750 it was turning out eighty tons of bar iron a year, and in 1771 Thomas Tyson is mentioned as the ironmaster (George Bownass' accounts). This would suffice for the needs of the neighbourhood, while at the same time the Deerpark, which we know was stocked in the seventeenth century and probably was preserved in the sixteenth, would make impossible the carrying on of smelting at Waterpark bloomery, which is within it, and at Springs, close to it. The relics from Peel Island, associated with iron works, seem to be mediæval, and the isolation of a forge on an island, as at Rampsholme in Derwentwater, implies that protection was sought, which would hardly be needed in Elizabethan and later times hereabouts. The conclusion seems to be that many of the little bloomeries are mediæval; that at Stable Harvey, perhaps the work of Conishead Priory after the grant of 1282, and those in Monk Coniston, the work of Furness Abbey.
The iron ore came from Low Furness, but there was an iron mine at the Red-dell head under Weatherlam. The Rev. Thomas Robinson, in his Natural History of Westmorland and Cumberland, 1709, says "Langdale & Cunningston mountains do abound most with iron veins; which supplies with Ore & keeps constantly going a Furnace in Langdale, where great plenty of good and malleable iron is made, not much inferior to that of Dantzick."