Medieval
Anyone walking to the western end of the village will eventually arrive at Cinder Hill, and the name itself is a clue to what once happened there. It derives from the accumulations of cinder that were left behind when this corner of the Weald rang with the noise of iron-making. Cinder was the waste by-product of the early iron industry, and enough of it piled up here to give the place its lasting name.
Cinder Hill sits within a region where iron was once made on a remarkable scale. The industry flourished across the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and it was no brief episode: Wealden iron-making endured for some two thousand years. Its beginnings lie far back in antiquity. Invading Celts brought iron smelting skills with them from France around 400 BC, and from that time onwards the forests and clay soils of the Weald supported a craft that would shape the landscape for centuries.
For most of that long span, iron was made in bloomeries. The word comes from the Saxon 'bloma', meaning a lump of metal, and it describes exactly what the process produced: a lump of iron, worked straight from the furnace. Bloomery production continued until the late 15th century, when newer methods began to take over.
What did a bloomery look like, and how do we know one stood at Cinder Hill? The evidence is partly documentary and partly written into the ground. The Ordnance Survey map marks a presumed bloomery site near 6 Cinder Hill Cottages, and the surroundings fit the pattern well. Cinder Hill is surrounded by eight ponds, and none of them are stream fed. That matters, because bloomery sites can be identified by ponds that are not fed by a stream or a spring. Such ponds were dug by the iron-makers themselves, and their still, self-contained water is one of the tell-tale signs that a furnace once stood nearby.
A bloomery pit could be some twenty feet deep, and the furnace that rose above it was a substantial structure. Temperatures inside reached 1200 ºC, hot enough to reduce iron oxide to metal. To achieve that heat, bellows had to be operated by teams of men, working in shifts for up to six hours at a stretch. The furnace dome was protected by an outer clay covering as much as 20 cms thick, shielding the structure from the fierce heat within.
The yield was modest. A bloom weighs about one-tenth of the weight of the original iron oxide that went into the furnace, so a great deal of ore and charcoal was consumed for a comparatively small lump of metal. Nor was that lump ready for immediate use. Blooms could not be cast into moulds; the metal of the period had to be hammered into shape rather than poured. Instead, blooms were sold to local smiths, who worked them at their forges. From those forges came the everyday essentials of medieval life: horseshoes, nails, knives and tools.
We know something of how such a business was run because two sets of accounts survive from a bloomery at Tudeley, dating from the mid 14th century. They record that four smiths worked the Tudeley furnace, and they reveal an arrangement that must have kept the men motivated: the smiths kept every seventh bloom for their own profit. The rate of work was steady rather than spectacular, about one bloom a day.
The accounts also tell us about money. In 1334 an average bloom sold for the equivalent of nine pence, while it cost about six and a half pence to produce, leaving a workable margin for the operator. Within twenty years of 1334, bloom prices had roughly doubled. The reason was the Black Death: the labour shortages that followed the plague pushed up the cost of everything that depended on skilled hands, and iron-making depended on them utterly.
How common were such works? A 1976 field survey counted some 146 such sites in the stretch between Heathfield and Eridge, a reminder that Cinder Hill was one node in a dense network of furnaces spread across the Weald. The land at Cinder Hill belonged to the Penshurst Estate, and the site there is believed to have been operating later than 1540, which would make it a late survivor of the old bloomery tradition.
Its end, when it came, was probably connected to a technological revolution. In 1540 Sir Henry Sidney bought the Robertsbridge furnace, which had water-driven bellows and a brick furnace. With these innovations, Robertsbridge produced wrought and cast iron more cheaply than the old bloomeries could manage, and the economics of the industry shifted decisively away from the men-tended, clay-domed furnaces of earlier centuries.
The old industry has not entirely vanished from view. It survives in the map, in place names that incorporate words like cinder, mine, hammer and furnace, each one marking a spot where iron was once made. Cinder Hill is a fine example: a name that carries the memory of furnaces, ponds and sweating bellows-teams across two thousand years of Wealden history.
Readers who wish to explore the subject further will find Jeremy Hodgkinson's article on the Wealden Iron Industry a valuable introduction. This article is by David Foster and first appeared in the Parish Magazine in December 2002 and January 2003.