Studying the Iron Industry in South East England
The Wealden Iron Research Group’s 2025 Winter Meeting will be held at Nutley War Memorial Hall on Saturday 25th January.
The speaker will be Dr Andrew Richardson, director of Isle Heritage, who will speak on the Lossenham Project: Settlement and ironworking in the Rother Valley.
Further details will be posted in due course.
Current Archaeology published a piece about WIRG in its ‘Odd Socs’ section in its issue of 3 April 2023. You can read it HERE
Following on from Tim Smith’s article in Newsletter 77 on the painting of ironworks by the artist Herri met de Bles that hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Grohmann Museum of the School of Engineering in Milwaukee, USA, has a collection of paintings of people in work situations. The collection includes two paintings by Marten van Valckenborch (1534-1612) which show furnaces and forges probably in the Meuse valley of southern Belgium.
Marten and his brother Lucas produced many paintings of similar scenes with ironworks as either the main subject or merely as features in the landscape.
WIRG’s experimental bloomery at Pippingford and its display at the Fernhurst Furnace Open Weekend were featured in an item on ITV’s local news broadcast by Meridian on 13 October 2022.
WIRG members Tim Smith, Jeremy Hodgkinson, Judie English and Jonathan Prus were interviewed during filming which took place on consecutive weekends in early September. The video sequence and accompanying text can be accessed here.