The Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire has many hidden treasures which have until more recent years remained largely unnoticed by the general public.
It was not until ‘A Week’s Holiday in the Forest of Dean’, written by Gloucester printer John Bellows, first appeared in 1881, that tourists gingerly began to venture into the dark, dangerous forest.
The area however holds claim to an earlier fame with it’s abundant resources in wood, coal, stone and minerals. These were used to bring about some of the earliest industrial innovations in Britain.
In October 2013 I had the good fortune to attend a local meeting of The Forest of Dean Buildings Preservation Trust. This small and dedicated team have been securing and restoring sites of signification heritage value in the area for some years. When we met they were ready to move forward with the next stage of their Gunn’s Mill conservation project.
Gunn’s Mill is one of the best preserved, early charcoal blast furnaces in northern Europe and was built in 1625. The site was first developed in 1435 as a corn and fulling mill.
It went through a number of transformations over the years and was significantly used to produce some of the earliest cast iron on an industrial scale from 1702.
In 2002 the surviving oak timbers were dendro-dated to 1618 raising the importance of this site to ‘unique’.
In an effort to help the team save this amazing site, I drew up an artist’s impression of what the original furnace, water wheel and surrounding buildings would have looked like.
Forest Verderer and historian Ian Standing kindly walked me though a short history of iron and showed me the archival photos and building plans from which the illustration was crafted.
With the hearth fire roaring and a cat on the fireside chair, we puzzled over roof lines and sketched up a few potential perspectives. Ian’s patience and expertise made it possible for me to envision how this site must have once looked.
It is now January and the drawing has been submitted along with other supporting documents to secure further funding for this worthy project.
The envisioned end result, will be a site with buildings and grounds restored to a level that makes it into a functional space, where several professionals in feilds relating to its early use can work.
The site may be open to the public at some level and it is hoped mentoring programs will be set up between these ‘professionals in residence’ and educational institutes whose students are studying subjects relevant to the site.
