Tudor & Stuart
The story of iron in the Weald stretches back far beyond the period with which this article is chiefly concerned. Ore was being won from the ground in West Kent long before the Romans arrived, and the working of metal continued through the Romano-British era. Even so, the great age of the Kentish iron trade came much later, running from the close of the fifteenth century until 1760, after which newer industrial methods swept the old furnaces aside.
The two eras left different marks on the landscape. Roman-British diggers opened out sizeable quarry workings, whereas in mediaeval times the ore was taken from round pits, some reaching a remarkable thirty-five feet in depth. When one pit was exhausted it was filled in with the spoil from digging the next, and the traces that survive today appear as shallow, saucer-like hollows in the ground. At Tugmore Shaw near Hartfield it is still possible to see a Romano-British quarry sitting alongside pits dug at a later date.
A blast furnace needed three things close at hand: ore, charcoal and water. The bellows that forced air into the furnace were driven by a waterwheel, and the fuel was charcoal burnt from local woodland, melting the ore dug nearby. The furnace structures themselves were generally raised from stone found in the district and stood roughly twenty-six feet tall. A charge took at least a full day before the iron was ready, but the accumulated metal and waste were not dragged from the hearth until several months had passed. For every part of iron produced, the process left behind three or four times as much slag, which was often spread on roads as a hard surface. Should the stream run dry, the men had to tread round the great wheel by hand to keep the blast alive.
The metal left the furnace in two forms. Sow bars could measure as much as nine feet, while pig iron came in more convenient pieces. Cast goods went straight from the furnace: fire-backs for the hearth, memorial plates that can still be seen in the churches at Cowden and Chiddingstone, weapons of war such as cannon, mortars and guns, and humbler items like sledges and fire irons. At Lamberhurst Furnace, the railings for St Paul's took a whole year to complete, and the product list extended even to railings and village stocks. Much of the output, however, travelled only a short distance downstream to a finery forge, itself water-powered, where a great hammer driven by water beat the cast metal into wrought-iron bars.
Water was the lifeblood of the industry, so furnaces often stood on modest streams rather than great rivers. One example is to be found on the upper Medway at Ashurst, in the direction of East Grinstead. A substantial hammer pond commonly lay above the furnace, though sometimes a chain of smaller ponds served instead. Work followed the water: the busy season ran from October through to June.
Furnaces were scattered across the Weald. Vauxhall stood at Tonbridge and Barden Furnace and Forge at Bidborough, the latter working into the early years of the eighteenth century. Others operated at Bough Beech, at Cowden from 1743, at Brede from 1636, at Robertsbridge and Lamberhurst, at Pippingford on Ashdown Forest, at Maresfield and Etchingham, while the site of Chingley furnace now lies beneath Bewle Water.
The trade declined during the middle of the seventeenth century, picked up again in the early eighteenth, and had all but vanished by 1760. Nothing now stands above ground in Kent to show where a furnace or forge once worked. At Leigh itself, the Cinder Hill Site points to activity at an earlier period, though whether Romano-British or mediaeval remains uncertain; David Forster examines the site in a separate piece in the Parish Magazine of May 2011.