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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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