Fascinating stuff, Mary!
I had heard of "bog iron", but had no idea of its source - well, that sounds daft, but ye ken what I mean.
I have for quite some time, been interested in the industrial history of the surrounding area of my home, and that interest has moved back in time as I discover tantalising evidence that the rolling green fields and Braes o' Fife conceal an industrial heritage older than the written document by far. The area I'm from in Fife is rich in iron, most of the early coal companies -spit- called themselves Coal and Iron Companies in one form or another, although metals and minerals dropped from their interest with accessibility to richer deposits, and eventually mass imports, towards the end of the C19th. There are deposits of exposed ochre in a local den, the working of which has never been thoroughly researched, but the entire bank of the burn running through it has been quarried extensively. There was an ochre mill there in the early C19th, but there have been no records kept with even a modicum of accuracy, and it is known there was iron smelting done there at the time. (I'm presuming that iron can be extracted from ochre with a high iron content, although that is beyond my knowledge base and I haven't bothered researching.) The fisher-folk's cottages are reported as being painted yellow or orange.
Old Fife, which historically included Kinross and Clackmannanshire, is the first region where coal is recorded as being deep mined. This was carried out around 1200 by the Cistercian monks of Culross, who proceeded to run a racketeering venture by Royal Charter, basically holding the entire Firth of Forth to ransom as they extorted tonnage tariffs for the use of their lighthouses, fuelled by Culross coal burned in open iron baskets. But they also seem to have produced iron, although there appear to be no record of where the iron came from. They got too rich too quickly and the venture was "re-possessed" by the crown and put firmly in the grasp of... you guessed it... The Bruces! Coal and Salt go hand in hand, as the salt-pans were fuelled by coal, but iron seems to have been a lucrative side-line for the local aristocracy, with the Crown turning a blind eye as they kept it quietly in the Bruce-Maitland-Crawford-Wemyss, etc, extended family circle.
The immediate area of my childhood home was once bog, according to General Roy's Military Survey of 1747-55, and remnants of that still exists in small areas of marshland. On reading this thread, it intrigues me to remember that the soil of my parents garden was a deep, rich dark loam on alluvium and red clay, which contained a buried tree-stump smack in the centre. It also contained what I recall to be lumps of rust-like material which crumbled as soon as you tried to remove them. Ancient occupation was quite apparent around the housing estate I was brought up on, as numerous gardens not too far away revealed ancient burials -I can remember a crowd of bairns standing gawping into one after "Mrs McKechnie Roond the Corner's Laddie" lifted a stone slab in their garden; a few pots, the remains of a beautiful bronze dagger and a skull are kept in the National Museum- but any archaeological evidence of how they lived has long gone. My assumption is that our ancestors chose to live there for the specific reason of availability of natural resources, and a source of iron would have been exploited the minute the technology arrived.
Unfortunately, any evidence of Iron Age, Bronze Age or Neolithic mining in the area has probably been obliterated by centuries of industrialisation, as with any evidence for the prehistoric use of coal, but I find it inconceivable that those whose very existence depended on investigating and utilising the resources around them didn't find a use for resources that quite literally surfaced all around them, and the answer to the question "How did they figure that out?" becomes far less puzzling.
I'm more than familiar with the kind of oily black peat bog you describe, as I too have stepped in the wrong place. I'd assume that these iron nodes would be found in the burns that run off from the likes of Rannoch as they erode from the peat. I'll take a look next time I'm around such country, although I won't go as far as saying that I'll try smelting the stuff, as the described process sounds similar to that of the folding and welding of steel for weaponry that was used throughout the old world and far too skilled for my cac-handedness!
Thanks for the food for thought,
Pango.
I had heard of "bog iron", but had no idea of its source - well, that sounds daft, but ye ken what I mean.
I have for quite some time, been interested in the industrial history of the surrounding area of my home, and that interest has moved back in time as I discover tantalising evidence that the rolling green fields and Braes o' Fife conceal an industrial heritage older than the written document by far. The area I'm from in Fife is rich in iron, most of the early coal companies -spit- called themselves Coal and Iron Companies in one form or another, although metals and minerals dropped from their interest with accessibility to richer deposits, and eventually mass imports, towards the end of the C19th. There are deposits of exposed ochre in a local den, the working of which has never been thoroughly researched, but the entire bank of the burn running through it has been quarried extensively. There was an ochre mill there in the early C19th, but there have been no records kept with even a modicum of accuracy, and it is known there was iron smelting done there at the time. (I'm presuming that iron can be extracted from ochre with a high iron content, although that is beyond my knowledge base and I haven't bothered researching.) The fisher-folk's cottages are reported as being painted yellow or orange.
Old Fife, which historically included Kinross and Clackmannanshire, is the first region where coal is recorded as being deep mined. This was carried out around 1200 by the Cistercian monks of Culross, who proceeded to run a racketeering venture by Royal Charter, basically holding the entire Firth of Forth to ransom as they extorted tonnage tariffs for the use of their lighthouses, fuelled by Culross coal burned in open iron baskets. But they also seem to have produced iron, although there appear to be no record of where the iron came from. They got too rich too quickly and the venture was "re-possessed" by the crown and put firmly in the grasp of... you guessed it... The Bruces! Coal and Salt go hand in hand, as the salt-pans were fuelled by coal, but iron seems to have been a lucrative side-line for the local aristocracy, with the Crown turning a blind eye as they kept it quietly in the Bruce-Maitland-Crawford-Wemyss, etc, extended family circle.
The immediate area of my childhood home was once bog, according to General Roy's Military Survey of 1747-55, and remnants of that still exists in small areas of marshland. On reading this thread, it intrigues me to remember that the soil of my parents garden was a deep, rich dark loam on alluvium and red clay, which contained a buried tree-stump smack in the centre. It also contained what I recall to be lumps of rust-like material which crumbled as soon as you tried to remove them. Ancient occupation was quite apparent around the housing estate I was brought up on, as numerous gardens not too far away revealed ancient burials -I can remember a crowd of bairns standing gawping into one after "Mrs McKechnie Roond the Corner's Laddie" lifted a stone slab in their garden; a few pots, the remains of a beautiful bronze dagger and a skull are kept in the National Museum- but any archaeological evidence of how they lived has long gone. My assumption is that our ancestors chose to live there for the specific reason of availability of natural resources, and a source of iron would have been exploited the minute the technology arrived.
Unfortunately, any evidence of Iron Age, Bronze Age or Neolithic mining in the area has probably been obliterated by centuries of industrialisation, as with any evidence for the prehistoric use of coal, but I find it inconceivable that those whose very existence depended on investigating and utilising the resources around them didn't find a use for resources that quite literally surfaced all around them, and the answer to the question "How did they figure that out?" becomes far less puzzling.
I'm more than familiar with the kind of oily black peat bog you describe, as I too have stepped in the wrong place. I'd assume that these iron nodes would be found in the burns that run off from the likes of Rannoch as they erode from the peat. I'll take a look next time I'm around such country, although I won't go as far as saying that I'll try smelting the stuff, as the described process sounds similar to that of the folding and welding of steel for weaponry that was used throughout the old world and far too skilled for my cac-handedness!
Thanks for the food for thought,
Pango.
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