I is for Ironstone

Welcome to Day 9 of my April A to Z Blog Challenge.

I is for Ironstone

 

It’s quite surprising what I turn up for researching when I decide I need to know more about some place I am describing in my fiction writing. My main character Margaret is sent to Edinburgh from her home in Milnathort, Fife. The most cost-effective way of arranging her transport is not via a train, which was historically relatively new in the area. Train journeys are expensive, so her parents hitch her a ride from the carter associated with the local woollen mill. The carter is hauling a load of goods produced in the linen and woollen mills in Milnathort, destined for the linen and woollen markets in Edinburgh. As they journey southwards in Fife to Burntisland, where Margaret will get a passenger ferry across the Firth of Forth, the carter describes much of the landscape they pass through since Margaret has never been so far south before.

Ironstone

 

He is a knowledgeable soul who loves to share the wonders of the countryside. He describes to her the crops in the fertile fields that they pass by, it being almost harvest time. Margaret is familiar with many of these as she has been educated to a good standard, but she has always been curious about the world around her. What she has little knowledge of are the new villages that have sprung up near the main post road that they journey over. The carter describes villages that are associated with pits that are still mining ironstone in 1851, though he tells her that coal extraction is becoming a more lucrative venture for some of the mine owners in Fife.

I decided I needed to find out a little bit more about ironstone and what it was used for.

 

After the Carron Iron works was established in the Falkirk area in the mid-eighteenth century, large amounts of iron was required for smelting. The manufacture of iron goods was a very substantial part of the economy and new ironstone seams were opened in Fife, and in other areas of central Scotland. The Fife pits produced substantial quantities of ‘clayband’ / 'banded iron formations’ type of stone, the kind needed for smelting in the Carron Iron works.

It wasn’t that simple, though. To extract the iron from the huge chunks of iron-stone meant a long and tortuous process. The amount of iron produced from one large chunk of stone was minimal, so it was a very labour-intensive process. There was also a lot of debris left over after ironstone (coal and even shale) was extracted. Alongside the mines and production areas, bings appeared across the landscape – man-made hills of unwanted debris that grew higher and higher as production carried on. These hills can also be referred to as a spoil tip, a boney pile, culm bank, gob pile, waste tip. I find bings or gob piles very descriptive! 

The bings Margaret passed by were perhaps not quite so high in 1851, but I have no historical images from 1851 to compare with today. 

Bings- Fife

 

There were other Scottish ironworks but the Carron Ironworks (near Falkirk) eventually became a very successful producer of the 'carronade', a cast iron cannon for Navy and Military uses, among other important products. By 1814, the Carron Iron works was the largest producer of iron products across Europe. 

 

An abandoned carronade outside the former 
Carron Iron Works

By the 1830s, the invention of hot-blast processes meant even more iron ore was required to feed the demand for iron products. There were many uses for the iron produced: iron-hulled ships; railways; heavy industrial machinery; steam engines and many more applications.

Some of the iron produced was shipped overseas during the nineteenth century but unfortunately for the miners of Fife it was sometimes a volatile business, demand not always paying the rewards for the miners. The extraction of the ironstone was little different from coal mining for the workers, wages almost on par, so it mattered little to the men who were involved in the often highly dangerous work.

Some of the earlier fields used to extract ironstone, like those near Lochgelly, later became more lucrative for coal extraction.

[This iron extraction was a very different process from the one I have described in my Celtic Fervour Series of Historical Fiction set in the late 1st century. During what was termed the Iron Age my characters, alive during the Roman Iron Age era, mainly used the products from bog-iron extraction to make their iron weapons and iron tools.]

Till my next A to Z post - enjoy your reading! 

Slàinte!

https://electricscotland.com/history/industrial/industry2.htm

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coal_bing,_Dewshill_colliery_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1809913.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carronade_at_the_Carron_Works,_near_Falkirk.jpg