Nearly two decades ago, I first stumbled upon the derelict ironworks in the vale near Frome, Somerset. The roofless buildings, furnaces stamped into cliff faces, and a chimney belching fresh air captivated me. It was Somerset's answer to Ironbridge, where dereliction had worn a path back to beauty. I peered through ivy-covered windowless windows at factory floors now populated by forests of skinny birch and tumbledown walls topped with spreading bushes—a greening by stealth.
Back then, the early internet offered no explanation for the valley's past as the site of ironworks producing edge tools—spades, shovels, sickles, and hoes that cultivated the county and beyond. But recently, an older form of communication rose up: a giant information panel with enough content to fill a novella. It was too much to take in at once, so we decided to digest sections one journey at a time.
Last week, I read about workers with their noses to the grindstone, sharpening blades and shortening lives—few lived to see their 40th birthday. The impact was so strong that I caught a whiff of metal flaking off, eerie and very real, perhaps a deep memory dredged from childhood of my father filing his tools.
Today, I am on firmer ground, scrambling over a humic layer as if following an estate agent's floorplan, rushing from room to room, forge to forge. Two hundred years ago, workers lined the cliff face with brick walls. In one compartment, there is still the low rectangular recess of a fireplace, backed with blackened bricks.
On my knees, spotting mouse droppings on a flat ledge, I see something dark and pebble-sized next to them. It is a surprisingly heavy object: a purplish-black bubble of iron. I must return it to its ledge, thinking of others before me and others to come who might feel this little weight of history.
