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Current Archaeology published a piece about WIRG in its ‘Odd Socs’ section  in its issue of 3 April 2023. You can read it HERE

The WIRG Summer Meeting and AGM
will be held on Saturday 27th July
at Dallington Village Hall,
The Old School, The Street, Dallington, TN21 9NH, East Sussex
For directions to Dallington and to Ashburnham Furnace click HERE
(Please note there is no car park at the hall but parking is available on the road)

Non-members of WIRG are welcome to the Summer Meeting and site visit but cannot vote at the AGM.

PROGRAMME

10.30am – Tea/Coffee

11.00am – Philip Riden, President of WIRG, will speak on
‘London and the Iron Trade 1690-1830’

12.30pm – WIRG Annual General Meeting

1.00pm –  Break for lunch
Bring your own; food is also available at The Swan PH, at Woods Corner

2.30pm – visit Ashburnham Furnace
by kind permission of the Wallace family
A map giving directions will be available at the meeting

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.