the readiest resource of the modern iron-smelter when improved
processes enabled him to reduce them--show that their principal iron
manufactures were carried on in that quarter*
[footnote...
"In the Forest of Dean and thereabouts the iron is made at this day
of cinders, being the rough and offal thrown by in the Roman time;
they then having only foot-blasts to melt the ironstone; but now, by
the force of a great wheel that drives a pair of Bellows twenty feet
long, all that iron is extracted out of the cinders which could not
be forced from it by the Roman foot-blast. And in the Forest of Dean
and thereabouts, and as high as Worcester, there ave great and
infinite quantities of these cinders; some in vast mounts above
ground, some under ground, which will supply the iron works some
hundreds of years; and these cinders ave they which make the prime
and best iron, and with much less charcoal than doth the
ironstone."--A. YARRANTON, England's Improvement by Sea and Land.
London, 1677.
...]
It is indeed matter of history, that about seventeen hundred years
since (A.D. 120) the Romans had forges in the West of England, both
in the Forest of Dean and in South Wales; and that they sent the
metal from thence to Bristol, where it was forged and made into
weapons for the use of the troops. Along the banks of the Wye, the
ground is in many places a continuous bed of iron cinders, in which
numerous remains have been found, furnishing unmistakeable proofs of
the Roman furnaces. At the same time, the iron ores of Sussex were
extensively worked, as appears from the cinder heaps found at
Maresfield and several places in that county, intermixed with Roman
pottery, coins, and other remains. In a bed of scoriae several acres
in extent, at Old Land Farm in Maresfield, the Rev. Mr. Turner found