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Wood Is No Longer THE Power
The acute wood shortage in the middle of the 1700s
led to a European energy crisis. In response there
was a shift to the increasing use of an inferior fuel:
coal. The shift to coal happened here in Britain first
because our wood shortage was the most acute.
Iron grew scarce and costly as production fell off
because England's forests could not supply enough
charcoal for smelting the ore. We had vast potential
resources of mineral coal but in its raw form this
was useless for iron smelting.
Necessity is for sure the mother of invention and
so it was that after three generations of trying, the
Darby family of iron masters, with lands rich in
coal but poor in wood for the charcoal they needed,
finally succeeded in transforming coal into coke.
This processed type of coal was clean and therefore
could be employed as a fuel to smelt iron. Slowly
but surely the wherewithal to make coke spread
and when the railways came, themselves powered
by coal, the new fuel could be transported anywhere
in the country making the production of iron for
the first time independent of location. The coal
revolution in England made it the first country in
the world to leave the wood era, and enter the
second iron age - the industrial revolution.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Reading List
You can read an extract of High Thomson’s
The Green Road into the Trees: An Exploration
of England
at
Tradition & Transformation in Anglo-Saxon
England: Archaeology, common rights and
landscape
. Dr. Susan Oosthuizen.
TheMaking of the British Landscape - how we
have transformed the land from prehistory to
today.
Francis Pryor.
This old coppiced ash stands on a parish boundary