Author: Jeremy Hodgkinson

SUMMER MEETING AND AGM 2025 – NEW DATE AND VENUE

Rearranged Summer meeting & AGM 2025

Following postponement due to the weather, the Summer Meeting and AGM will now be held on

SATURDAY 6TH SEPTEMBER 2025
at
Dial Post Village Hall, Worthing Road, Dial Post, West Sussex, RH13 8NH

Non-members of WIRG are welcome to the Summer Meeting and site visit 

Agenda for the day

11.00 to 12.00 Coffee / tea – book stall.
12.00 Introduction to Shipley Forge
12.30 Annual General Meeting of the Wealden Iron Research Group.

13.00 Lunch break:  Lunch is not provided; please bring your own – you can picnic on the village green or in the hall or there is an excellent pub. Food is also available at The Crown Inn, 100m N of the Hall, or the Knepp Wilding Restaurant at the Knepp Estate car park (if you wish to re-mortgage your house!).

14.30 Depart from outside the Crown Inn for site visit to Shipley Forge, on the Knepp rewilding estate. Park in Shipley Village, School Lane RH13 8PL. (see map). A 2 mile return walk to the site via Shipley’s 12C church to see the tomb of Thomas Caryll owner of Shipley Forge and Knepp Furnace. (For the less agile a few cars can be parked on the verge in Swallows Lane at the junction of Pound Lane & Countryman Lane – see map – but park well south of the junction which is on a bend). There remains a 500m walk along a metalled farm track to the forge.

The walk from Shipley to the Forge site will be along footpaths, a lane and a farm track (see map below). The distance is one mile each way. The forge site is now fenced off as part of Knepp’s reintroduction of beavers but the original bay and water supply are evident and the pond is in water – albeit confined by a modern bay. Recent finds consist of a forge bottom (slag tapped out of the finery hearth ) and a heavy iron plate which was probably the base of the forge. Straker also found the tail end of a sow at the site which is now on display at Horsham Museum.

The route along footpaths from Shipley village to the forge

 

EXPERIMENTAL SMELTING – 6 SEPTEMBER SMELT CANCELLED

The group carries out experiments in a bloomery furnace similar to those that were operated in the Weald from pre-Roman times until the end of the Middle Ages.

Smelt Days 2025

THE SMELT PLANNED FOR 6 SEPTEMBER HAS BEEN CANCELLED
due to the postponed WIRG Summer Meeting and AGM  now being held on that day (see What’s On)

Smelts take place at Pippingford Park which is about six miles south of East Grinstead off the A22, between Wych Cross and Nutley.  We will be there from early Saturday morning to preheat the furnace and expect to start charging ore at about 11am with the drawing of the furnace around 3.30pm.

If you wish to attend please contact Tim Smith at the Secretary for detailed instructions how to find the site which is in woodland, and also so you can be informed should the event have to be postponed due to weather conditions which can be too wet (as we use an electrical pump) or too dry as the latter is a fire risk to the surrounding woodland.

Notices will be posted to indicate where to park.

NOTE, the site is in woodland so will be shaded but insects can be fierce so repellent, long sleeved shirt and trousers are recommended.

Attendance requires participants to be members of WIRG. If you are not a member an application form can be downloaded from application form (PDF). The Membership fee is £15 and includes a bi-annual Newsletter and the annual Bulletin Wealden Iron and the option to attend a programme of fieldwork in the autumn and winter, as well as bi-annual meetings with visiting speakers, small-scale excavations, and a variety of other projects undertaken by its members.

 

More Paintings of Early-Modern Ironworks

Following on from Tim Smith’s article in Newsletter 77 on the painting of ironworks by the artist Herri met de Bles that hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Grohmann Museum of the School of Engineering in Milwaukee, USA, has a collection of paintings of people in work situations. The collection includes two paintings by Marten van Valckenborch (1534-1612) which show furnaces and forges probably in the Meuse valley of southern Belgium.
Marten and his brother Lucas produced many paintings of similar scenes with ironworks as either the main subject or merely as features in the landscape.

A river valley with iron mining scenes, 1612; Marten van Valckenborch (Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee).

A smelt using the new reciprocating blower

In a move towards greater authenticity in our smelting experiments at Pippingford Park we have switched from our vortex blower, which supplies a constant flow of air, to an electrically driven reciprocating pump kindly denoted to WIRG by Peter Crew who conducted numerous experimental smelts using this in North Wales. Designed and built by Roger Miles, using a section of mains water pipe as the cylinder and a motor from a washing machine, the reciprocating pump better simulates blowing with bellows. This would have been the method used in early times, but requires a number of fit personnel to supply air for the duration of a day’s smelt.

Our latest smelt revealed both the change in colour of the flame as reduction takes place with the flame at the start being yellow and luminous as carbon monoxide is burning away, then fades to a more transparent flame as the ore consumes carbon monoxide during reduction. The flame returns to a luminous state during ‘burn down’ once all the ore has been reduced.

A temperature profile during the smelt shows a general fall in temperature while reduction takes place, as this is an endothermic (takes heat) reaction. This is best seen following the red line which is the thermocouple in the hotter position, closest to the reduction region.

A TV reporter from Meridian News filmed part of the smelt, interviewing me, and also Jeremy Hodgkinson, Jonathan Prus and Judie English the following weekend at the Fernhurst Open Day. You can see the filmed sequence HERE

Our final smelt for the season is scheduled for Saturday 8 October.  Should you wish to come, but the weather forecast be wet, check with Tim (01403 710148) on the Friday evening to see if we have had to postpone.

Tim Smith

Click HERE to see a short video of the different stages of the smelt (66.3Mb -Be patient!).

Help Needed – Who owns Roman sites?

Our sponsored PhD student Ethan Greenwood is planning his post-doctoral project, which will look further into Roman sites in the Weald. In these restricted times it will not be possible for him to call on prospective owners of sites to seek access to them, so he is appealing to WIRG members for help in identifying who owns some of these sites.

Details of the Roman sites can be found by following THIS LINK.

If you know a person who owns one or more of these sites, please pass on their contact details (address, phone number or email) to Ethan Greenwood so he can get in touch with them.