thirty tons of charcoal forge pig iron, and consumed forty dozen sacks of charcoal; so that sixteen sacks of charcoal were consumed in making one ton of pigs." This furnace was, he believes, "the first charcoal furnace which in this country was blown with air compressed in iron cylinders." Flaxley was one of the very last places where iron was made in the old way. The Rev. T. Budge, writing at the commencement of the present century, says of it:-- "The iron manufactory is still carried on, and the metal is esteemed peculiarly good; but its goodness does not arise from any extraordinary qualities in the ore, but from the practice of working the furnace and forges with charcoal wood, without any mixture of pit-coal. "The quantity of charcoal required is so considerable that the furnace cannot be kept in blow or working more than nine months successively, the wheels which work the bellows and hammers being turned by a powerful stream of water. At this time (28th Oct. 1802) a cessation has taken place for nearly a year. Lancashire ore, which is brought to Newnham by sea, furnishes the principal supply; the mine found in the Forest being either too scanty to answer the expense of raising it, or when raised too difficult of fusion, and consequently too consumptive of fuel, to allow the common use of it. "When the furnace is at work, about twenty tons a week are reduced to pig iron; in this state it is carried to the forges, where about eight tons a week are hammered out into bars, ploughshares, &c., ready for the smith." Though these operations have been long given up, the furnace buildings removed, and the pools drained in which the water accumulated for driving the machinery, yet the old people of the neighbourhood still recollect when the Castiard's Vale, now wholly devoted to the picturesque, resounded with the noise of engines. A solitary heap of Lancashire iron mine alone remains to show what was once operated upon at this spot. The year 1795 marks the period when the manufacture of iron was resumed in the Forest by means of pit-coal cokes at Cinderford, the above date being preserved on an inscription stone in No. 1 furnace. "The conductors of the work succeeded," in the words of the late Mr. Bishop, communicated to the author,-- "As to fact, and made pig iron of good quality; but from the rude and insufficient character of their arrangements, they failed commercially as a speculation, the quantity produced not reaching twenty tons per week. The cokes were brought from Broadmoor in boats, by a small canal, the embankment of which may be seen at the present day. The ore was carried down to the furnaces on mules' backs, from Edge Hill and other mines. The rising tide of iron manufacture in Wales and Staffordshire could not fail to swamp such ineffectual arrangements, and as a natural consequence Cinderford sank.