Part 6
All these have been bloomeries of a somewhat similar kind, and on Peel Island some iron works have been carried on of a rather different type, and perhaps at a different period. Small bloomeries have also been in blast at Tom-gill (the beck coming down from the Monk Coniston Tarns, often called Glen Mary), and at Stable Harvey in Blawith. One is said to be at the limekiln in Yewdale. There were two bloomeries of the later and larger type at Coniston Forge (up stream from the church) and at Low Nibthwaite, and two others further down the Crake, making sixteen in all the valley now known. There are, of course, many beside in the Lake District, as in other parts of the country.
That there were iron works before the Conquest in Furness appears from the place-name of "Ouregrave" in _Domesday_, which must be identical with Orgrave. At this place, early in the thirteenth century, Roger of Orgrave gave Furness Abbey the mine "cum ... aquæ cursu ad illam scil. mineriam lavandum," a grant confirmed by his son Hamo in 1235 (_Coucher Book of Furness_, p. 229). About 1230 Thomas le Fleming gave them iron mines in Elliscales. By 1292 a great part of their income was derived from iron works.
Canon Atkinson, in his introduction to the _Coucher Book of Furness_, c. xviii., reckoned that they must have had some forty hearths to produce the iron they made. When the wood near the mines was exhausted, it became easier to carry the ore to the place where charcoal was burned than to bring the charcoal--so much greater in bulk--to the ore. An acre of forest was not enough to supply charcoal for smelting two tons of metal, and so the woods were gradually devastated over a wider and wider area.
In 1240 the abbey, which owned the eastern side of the lake, but not the lake itself, got leave from the baron of Kendal to put boats on the lake of Coniston for fishing and carrying. The carrying was chiefly of timber for building, but the tops and branches were no doubt used for charcoal. That on the other shore the smelting works were creeping up the valley is seen from the grant, before 1282, of William de Lancaster to Conishead Priory of the dead wood in Blawith for charcoal to supply the canons' bloomeries--for it was not only Furness Abbey that dealt in iron; and, indeed, more bloomeries exist on the side that did not belong to the abbey than on the shore that did. Thus in the thirteenth century we infer that smelting went on by Coniston Lake shore well up the west side.
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.
The iron ore came from Low Furness, but there was an iron mine at the Red-dell head under Weatherlam. The Rev. Thomas Robinson, in his _Natural History of Westmorland and Cumberland_, 1709, says "Langdale & Cunningston mountains do abound most with iron veins; which supplies with Ore & keeps constantly going a Furnace in Langdale, where great plenty of good and malleable iron is made, not much inferior to that of Dantzick."
SLATE.
Roofing slabs have been found in the ruins of Calder Abbey and the Well Chapel at Gosforth, both mediæval; in the mansion on Lord's Island, Derwentwater, destroyed before the end of the seventeenth century, we found green Borrowdale roofing slates. Purple Skiddaw roofing slates were also found in the ruins of a seventeenth and eighteenth century cottage at Causeway Head near Keswick. But it was not until the eighteenth century that quarrying began to develop. Mr. H. S. Cowper, in his _History of Hawkshead_, says that the Swainsons, from about 1720, worked a quarry in the Coniston flag formation near the Monk Coniston Tarns, and sent out their flags even as far as Ulverston Church. Fifty years later George Bownass, the Coniston blacksmith, was the great purveyor and repairer of tools, and from his ledger the names of his customers, gathered by Mr. Herbert Bownass, throw light on the history of the industry in the second half of the eighteenth century.
In 1770 appear William Jackson & Co. and Edward Jackson, no doubt of Tilberthwaite. In 1771, the Company of Slate-getters at Pennyrigg, Saddlestones, Cove and Hodge Close; Zachias Walker & Co., at Cove; George Tyson & Co., quarry owners; William Atkinson & Co., at Scoadcop Quarry; John Masacks & Co., at Cove; John Atkinson, slate merchant, Torver Fell Quarry; Wm. Fleming and Thomas Callan, Stang End Quarry; Matthew Carter, Stang End Quarry; also George Thompson and Wm. Vickers at a quarry with an unreadable name, and John Johnson, Jonathan Youdale, Wm. Wilson, Anthony Rigg and Wm. Stopart, slate-getters. In 1772, William Atkinson, Broadscop Quarry; John Speding & Co., quarry owners; slate-getters at Bove Beck or Gatecrag Quarries; Wm. Parker, slate merchant, Langdale; Wm. Fleming, Bessy Crag Quarry; Wm. Johnson, Pennyrigg Quarry; and John Vickers, Thomas and Rowland Wilson, John Casson, and George Bownass, slate-getters.
Of the quarries here mentioned as working 130 years ago Stang End and Bessy Crag are in Little Langdale, Pennyrigg and Hodge Close on opposite sides of the Tilberthwaite valley; Cove is on the flank of the Old Man above Gaitswater; Scoadcop and Broadscop look like variants of the name Goldscope, the quarry opposite Cove, and near Blind Tarn, to the right hand as you go up Walna Scar; Torverfell Quarry may be Ashgill; Saddlestones is the quarry seen on the way up the Old Man (page 3).
Father West in 1774 said that "the most considerable slate quarries in the kingdom" were in the Coniston Fells; the slate was shipped from Penny Bridge "for differents parts of the kingdom." In 1780, Green saw the quarry near the top of the Old Man "in high working condition." W. Rigge & Son of Hawkshead, who worked some of them, exported 1,100 tons and upward a year, and the carriage to Penny Bridge was 6s. 10d. to 7s. 10d. a ton. The slate was shipped at Kirkby Quay upon sailing boats, of which there were enough upon the water in 1819 to furnish the subject of a paragraph in Green's _Guide_ describing a scene of "bustle and animation."
From papers given by Mr. John Gunson of Ulpha to the Coniston Museum, we can gather a few particulars of the slate trade in the early part of the nineteenth century. John Atkinson of Ivytree, Blawith, in 1803 was interested in the Tilberthwaite Quarries, and in 1804 applied for leave to redeem the Land Tax on the ground they covered, the annual sum being £2 13s. 4d. From 1820 we find John Atkinson & Co. working seven quarries--Ashgill (to the left hand as you go up Walna Scar) the most important, occupying usually about a dozen men, and worked at considerable profit until 1830, when it began to show a deficit; Tilberthwaite, after 1820 giving employment to about seven men, with fair profit until 1826, when the men seem to have been withdrawn to work a quarry at Wood in Tilberthwaite for a year and a half; Goldscope, employing from nine to fifteen men between 1821 and 1826, when the Cove Quarry seems to have been run with no great profit or energy until 1832; and Mosshead, on the north-east side of the Old Man, at the head of Scrow Moss, was worked in 1829 and at a loss. The Outcast Quarry, near Slater's Bridge (now Little Langdale Quarries), is mentioned only in 1830. The best workmen were paid 3s. 6d. a day; lads seem to have started at 6d. There are notes of indentures, in Atkinson's account-book, from which it seems that apprentices at the riving and dressing began at 1s. or 1s. 6d., with a yearly rise to 2s. 6d., before they were out of their time. The profits were fluctuating--Goldscope in two years (1821-23) produced £1,072 17s. worth of slates, and paid £719 18s. 10d. in wages; Ashgill in 1826 made £381 less powder, tools, candles, &c.; but these were good years. The royalties to Lady le Fleming on Cove and Mosshead for 1827-32 amounted to £33 6s.
Tilberthwaite was the old possession of the Jacksons. Their ancestor had come from Gosforth, Cumberland, about 1690, and is said to have acquired it by marriage from the Walkers, who held the land in freehold, not, as usual hereabouts, in customary tenure under a lord of the manor. The Jacksons held most of Tilberthwaite, Holm Ground, and Yewdale until their estates were bought by Mr. James Garth Marshall, and it was by marriage with an Elizabeth Jackson that John Woodburn of Kirkby Quarries came to have an interest in the slate trade here. His name appears in John Atkinson's account books after 1832, and he seems to have taken over the actual working of the quarries. In 1904 the total output of the Coniston quarries (Cove, High Fellside, Mossrigg and Klondyke, Parrock, Saddlestone, and Walna Scar) was 3438 tons; value at the quarries, £12,251.
WOOD.
In spite of local production, iron was not plentiful in the eighteenth century. Iron nails were too valuable for common use, though they are found in quantities at the old furnaces on Peel Island and elsewhere, which must date from an earlier period. Wooden pegs were substituted in making kists and other furniture, house roofs, doors and boats. The trade in woodwork of many kinds flourished in Coniston and its neighbourhood.
We have already mentioned the sixteenth century "Cowpers and Turners, with makyng of Coles," and the Baptist tanner of Monk Coniston in the seventeenth century; his tannery was, no doubt, that at Bank Ground. Another old tannery was at Dixon Ground in Church Coniston. Bark peeling and charcoal burning are among the most ancient and continuous industries; the round huts of the charcoal burners and their circular pitsteads can be traced, though overgrown and so nearly obliterated as to resemble prehistoric remains, in many of the woods, or places which once were wooded.
In George Bownass' ledger, already quoted, John Bell & Co. are named as wood-mongers in 1771, and in 1772 the same smith repaired the "coal boate" owned by the executors of William Ford.
In 1820 the old _Lonsdale Magazine_ says that the woods were cut every fifteen or sixteen years, and brought in the same value as if the land had been under cultivation. The wood was used for charcoal in smelting (and later in gunpowder making), for poles, hoops, and birch besoms; bird-lime was made from the bark of the holly, and exported to the West Indies.
As the Lancashire spinning increased there was a great demand for bobbins, and large quantities of small copse wood went to the turning mills. There was one near the Forge at Coniston, and a later bobbin mill farther down stream at Low Beck. Others were worked at Hawkshead Hill by W. F. Walker, and more recently at Sunnybank in Torver. But this industry has now died out.
An agreement in possession of Mr. H. Bownass, dated February 13th, 1798, between John Jackson of Bank Ground, gent. (landlord), and Robert Townson of the Gill, yeoman (tenant), of the one part, and T. Mackreth of Bank Ground, tanner, and John Gaskerth of Mattson Ground, Windermere, woollen manufacturer, of the other, authorises the building of a watermill for spinning and carding on the land called the Becks and Lowlands in Church Coniston. The carding mill near Holywath was owned early in the nineteenth century by Mr. Gandy of Kendal, and managed by Mrs. Robinson of the Black Bull.
* * * * *
The rise of Coniston trade is shown pretty accurately by the returns of population in this period. In 1801 Church Coniston contained 338 persons; in 1811, 460; in 1821, 566; and in 1831, 587. At this last date there were 101 houses inhabited and 9 empty, none building; and there were 102 families of which 25 were employed in agriculture, 65 in trade, mining, &c., and 12 beside. In Monk Coniston with Skelwith the population in 1801 was 286; in 1811, 386; in 1821, 426; and in 1831 it had dropped to 397. There were then 78 houses occupied and 12 empty; 36 families lived by agriculture, 2 by trade or manufacture, and 41 otherwise. This means that the village was always the home of the miners and quarrymen, while "at the back of the water" there was a gradually increasing settlement of gentlefolk attracted to the place by its scenery. In the later half of the century the population of Church Coniston, after reaching 1324 in 1861, fell to 1106 in 1871, 965 in 1881, and 964 in 1891; showing the decline of the once flourishing industrial enterprises. During the next decade the slate trade increased, and in 1901 the population had risen to 1111, whence the new rows of houses which, if not picturesque, were much needed. It is no longer possible to crowd the cottages as in mid-Victorian days when, it is said, the miners coming down from their work took the beds _warm_ from the men on the other shift. And yet, granting the necessity, one cannot help regretting the meanness and ugliness of much recent building in the village. A pleasant exception is the new office for the Bank of Liverpool at the bridge, which is a clever adaptation of the old cottage, making a pretty effect without pretentiousness; and perhaps, with this example, local enterprise may still create--what is far from impossible--a little town among the mountains worthy of its environment.
IX.--OLD CONISTON.
The poet Gray, author of _The Elegy in a Country Churchyard_, in his tour of 1769, and Gilpin, in search of the picturesque, in 1772, did not seem to hear of Coniston as worth seeing. The earliest literary description is that of Thomas West, the Scotch Roman-Catholic priest, who wrote the _Antiquities of Furness_ in 1774. He illustrated his book with a map "As Survey'd by Wm. Brasier 1745," in which are marked Coniston Kirk, Hall, Waterhead, Townend, Thurston Water, Piel I., Nibthwaite, Furnace, Nibthwaite Grange, Blawith Chap., Waterycot (by obvious error for "yeat"), Oxenhouse, Torver Kirk, Torver Wood (Hoathwaite), New Brig (the old pack-horse bridge), White Maidens, Blind Tarn, Goat's Tarn, Low Water, Lever Water, and so on, giving names in use 150 years ago.
West says:--"The village of Coniston consists of scattered houses; many of them have a most romantic appearance owing to the ground they stand on being extremely steep." Later editions add:--"Some are snow white, others grey ... they are all neatly covered with blue slate, the produce of the mountains, beautified with ornamental yews, hollies, and tall pines or firs."
Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, author of the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ and other romantic novels, came here in 1794 or earlier; and after describing the Rhine, and all the other lakes, found Thurston Lake "one of the most interesting, and perhaps the most beautiful," though she took the Hall for a Priory, and sentimentalised about the "solemn vesper that once swelled along the lake from these consecrated walls, and awakened, perhaps, the enthusiasm of the voyager, while evening stole upon the scene." Conishead, not Coniston, was the Priory; the confusion between the two has been often made.
With fuller knowledge and from no hasty glance, Wordsworth soon afterwards described the same spot (_Prelude_, VIII.):--
A grove there is whose boughs Stretch from the western marge of Thurston mere With length of shade so thick that whoso glides Along the line of low-roofed water, moves As in a cloister. Once--while in that shade Loitering I watched the golden beams of light Flung from the setting sun, as they reposed In silent beauty on the naked ridge Of a high eastern hill--thus flowed my thoughts In a pure stream of words fresh from the heart: Dear native regions, wheresoe'er shall close My mortal course, there will I think on you....
Need I quote farther the famous outburst of patriotism?--it was our lake that roused it. And another great enthusiasm was stirred by our Coniston Fells.
In 1797 the landscape painter Turner came here as a youth of 23 on his first tour through the north. After his pilgrimage among the Yorkshire abbeys, so finely described by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, vol. v., the young artist seems to have arrived among the fells one autumn evening, and sketched the Old Man from the Half-penny Alehouse. Then--I piece this together from the drawings and circumstances--he went round to spend the night at the Black Bull with old Tom Robinson and his wife, the daughter of Wonderful Walker. She was a wonderful woman herself; had been first a miner's wife, helping him to rise to a clerkship at the Leadhill Mines in Dumfriesshire, and on his death returning to Seathwaite; then, sorely against her old father's will, taking up with Tom, and settling at Townend to farm; afterwards for many years at the Black Bull, keeping the inn, managing the carding mill, and acting as parish officer in her turn; a notable figure, in mob cap and bedgown and brat; sharp tongued and shrewd of judgment. What did she make, I wonder, of the sunburnt, broad-shouldered lile cockney, with his long brown curls, his big nose and eagle eyes, and his sketch-book, "spying fancies?" Early in the morning he was out and scrambling up Lang Crags. It was one of the magical, misty autumnal sunrises we know so well. There had been rain, and Whitegill was full, thundering down the precipice at his feet. The fog was breaking away from the valley beneath, and rising in drifts and swirls among the clefts of Raven Crag, and the woods of Tilberthwaite. Far away, serene in the morning light, stood Helvellyn. It was his earliest sight of the mountain glory; the thrill of emotions never to be forgotten. Going home to London, he painted his first great mountain subject, afterwards in the National Gallery--the first picture for which he was moved to quote poetry in the Academy catalogue, and this from _Paradise Lost_--"Morning on Coniston Fells:--
Ye mists and exhalations that now rise From hill or streaming lake, dusky or grey, Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold In honour to the world's Great Author rise."
By this time the fashion of visiting the lakes was coming in, enough to give employment to a guide--Creighton, whom Captain Budworth, about 1790, described as a self-taught scholar, claiming descent from a noble family in Scotland, and fond of bragging about the nobility he had taken up the fells. His son William was something of a genius; he was found here by John Southern of Soho drawing a map of the world with home-made mathematical instruments, but using them with immense skill. Mr. Southern took him into his drawing office, and young Creighton, by hard study, became a considerable linguist, astronomer, and cartographer.
To the old Black Bull, De Quincey came from Oxford in 1806 to see Wordsworth. Next year William Green, the artist and guide-book writer, was there, and went up Walna Scar with Robinson. Mrs. Robinson died in extreme old age, and afterwards Adam Bell was landlord (1849); in 1855, Edward Barrow.
The tourist business made more hotels necessary. In 1819 the old Waterhead Inn was called the New Inn as distinguished from the Black Bull. It stood at the head of the lake, where now is the plantation between the letter-box and the sign-post. In Holland's aquatint view (1792), a rambling farmhouse is shown there, but not called an inn. This became a favourite stopping place for tourists. John Ruskin's father was fond of it, and often stayed there alone or with his family. But John Ruskin, returning in 1867, wrote--"Our old Waterhead Inn, where I was so happy playing in the boats, _exists_ no more." The present hotel was built by Mr. Marshall in 1848-49, and tenanted by Mr. Atkinson, afterwards by Mr. and Mrs. Sly, and now by Mr. Joseph Tyson.
In 1849 the landlord of the Crown was Isaac Massicks. The Ship, in 1849, was kept by John Aitkin; the Rising Sun, in 1855, by James Harker. The old Half-penny Alehouse was pulled down in 1848 to build Lanehead.
To tell the story of the many "worthies" of Coniston, and to trace the fortunes of 'statesman families often wandering far into the world, and winning a fair share of renown, would need a volume to itself. One or two names we can hardly omit--such as Lieut. Oldfield of Haws Bank, who piloted the fleet into Copenhagen, and received his commission from Nelson for that deed; and Sailor Dixon, who fought under Howe on the first of June and under Duncan at Camperdown; twice taken prisoner, once retaken and once escaping from Dunkirk; implicated in the great mutiny of 1797, and yet acquitted by court martial, he lived at Coniston to the age of 71.
With these might be mentioned the soldier John Jackson, whose records of foreign service in the Crimea and elsewhere are still extant. His cousin, the late Roger Bownass, left many papers of interest to the student of Old Coniston. The first of his family came in 1710 from Little Langdale, and bought from William Fleming of Catbank for thirteen pounds odd the smith's shop at the place called Chapel Syke, _i.e._, where the Crown Inn bar is now; a stream rising above the Parsonage used to cross the road there, whence the name. He bought also the old Catbank Farmhouse and its land now covered with cottages. His son was about twelve or fourteen in 1745, and told the writer of the manuscript history of the family that he remembered taking a cartload of cannon balls, forged at the smithy, to Kendal for the Duke of Cumberland's army.