Coleford, Gloucestershire

 

Wood, coal and iron

The Forest of Dean, the area of ancient Gloucestershire woodland between the Rivers Severn and Wye, is a place of extraordinary natural beauty. Ancient trees, including oak, beech, sweet chestnut, birch, holly and various conifers, abound, while parts of the forest are rich in wild flowers and fungi. What surprises many visitors is that the region also has a rich industrial history. It was once studded with coal mines (a few were still worked when I was a boy) and places where iron ore was extracted. Because there was both iron ore and trees to make charcoal, there was a major iron-smelting industry in Roman times and in the Middle Ages, when the metal was sent to centres such as Gloucester as well as being worked locally.

In the late-18th century, iron smelters in many regions realised that coke could be a more efficient fuel for their furnaces and by the 1790s, some industrialists were making coke from the local coal and using it to smelt iron. Just outside Coleford there are the remains of a large coke-fired blast furnace that was built for smelting iron ore in 1798. Investors in the furnace included a stockbroker from London called Thomas Halford. He became unhappy with the money that iron from the furnace was making him – it took about 80 tons of iron ore and 120 tons of coke to make a mere 20 tons of pig iron. Halford began to correspond with an expert in the field, David Mushet of Derbyshire. Mushet went into partnership with Halford and by 1810 had moved to the Forest to run the furnace.

It quickly became clear to Mushet that he couldn’t make a profit from the furnace – rich as the local ore was, the Forest coal simply didn’t lend itself to coke production. Mushet sold his shares and Halford eventually went bankrupt. The ruined furnace remains, its great arch leading into a vast space where the ore was heated. The size of the structure, the very thick walls, the chunky masonry all speak of a purposeful industrial structure here among the trees. There was originally also a steam engine to pump away and send a blast of air into the furnace to keep the internal temperature high enough to melt the iron. The clanking engine, the horse-drawn tramroad bringing in coal and ore, the activity of the workmen – all of this must have made this a noisy, bustling place. It’s quiet now, with the occasional sound of traffic on the road to Coleford the loudest sound, and between the cars, the song of birds.

Coleford, Gloucestershire

Writing the Forest, 2

Tom Cousins’ second Forest of Dean mural is on one the side of a former pub in Coleford. It shows three more writers, all linked with the local area, who put the place into their work – or for whom the place lies at the heart of their work. Joyce Latham (1932–2007) grew up near Berry Hill. She wrote poetry and memoirs about her childhood in the Forest. She’s not widely known now, but in her time was a much loved Forest figure. F. W. Harvey (1888–1957) was a poet of the First World War. He was one of the important group of poets of that war who served as private soldiers, unlike many of the most famous war poets who were officers, and like one of my favourites, Ivor Gurney, who was a close friend of Harvey’s. Both wrote movingly of the wartime lives of the troops, and although Gurney is the greater poet, some of Harvey’s works, including the famous ‘Ducks’, still appear in anthologies of war poetry. Harvey spent much of his life as a solicitor, but continued to publish. He also wrote a prose memoir of his time in a PoW camp, which was praised when it came out just after the war. As a young man, Dennis Potter (1935–94) produced one of the best books about his local area, The Changing Forest. He wrote it having left the Forest to go to Oxford and to begin a career in television (he also covered the area in a TV documentary), and could write about his home territory from a special combination of intellectual detachment and deep emotional involvement. He became famous for writing a string of television plays and serial dramas – Stand Up Nigel Barton, Blue Remembered Hills, The Singing Detective, for example – that were controversial and changed the medium. This work was often criticised for both its subject matter and its frankness, but was, rightly I think, very widely praised too. Several of the series and plays were at least partly set in the Forest and in some cases filmed there on location. He never left the place emotionally and lived in later life not far away from it in Ross-on-Wye. Like all the writers celebrated in these murals, the Forest stayed with him,* and he took the place into the consciousness of so many more.  

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* It remained with Potter until the very end of his life. The memories of the Forest in his last interview with Melvyn Bragg, just a few weeks before his death, were for me the most moving sections of that most moving of interviews.