OUT OF THE ASHES: BARROW SLAG-BANK TRANSFORMED.
Weathercock of the furnace chimneys.
But no grey smoke-tail
Pointers the mood of the wind.
From ‘On the Closing of Millom Ironworks’ by Norman Nicholson
The memory of Barrow’s mighty Iron and Steelworks has long faded, and few physical traces remain; yet it was iron and steel that created Barrow, that took it from a handful of cobble and clay-built farms to an industrial powerhouse exporting its products all over the world. The legacy of ‘King Vulcan’ is complex, it lies in the town of Barrow itself, its terraced streets, grand municipal buildings, public park, and the steel it produced which wrapped itself around the world in the form of railway tracks. Inescapably, also, it lies in the bewildered air of lost prosperity that pervades the town, and while the steelworks itself has been entirely erased, there are those less convenient monuments, the ramparts of slag waste which stretch along the coast at North Hindpool adjacent to the Walney Channel. The money has moved on, yet within this post-industrial edgeland a new alchemy is at work, the evolution of an ecologically rich mosaic, a rare and quietly observed natural renaissance.
Iron ore, in the form of blood red nodules of haematite, had been mined in Furness for centuries but it was not until the late 18th century that it reached a commercial scale. The shelter of Walney Island offered a safe harbour at Barrow and from the mid 18th century and a small port developed to carry away the iron ore to smelting works in Wales and the Midlands. By 1854 some 360,000 tons of iron ore were being raised in Furness, almost all of which was transported by road to the port of Barrow. The coming of the railways answered every speculator’s prayer. In 1859 a new ironworks was put into blast at Hindpool in Barrow. Two years later a railway line, sponsored by the Furness Railway and the ironmasters of Barrow, from Barnard Castle to Tebay, filled the gap in the network, to secure further markets for Furness ore and bring in Durham coking coal to the Hindpool furnaces. In 1860 the French metallurgist Sampson Jordan reported, ‘Six furnaces are at present in blast producing about 2,500 tons of pig metal per week ... on average upward of 60 tons per furnace in 24 hours, a production hitherto unparalleled in the metallurgy of iron.’
A Bessemer steel plant was started in Barrow in 1865 and the following year it merged with the Hindpool Ironworks to form the Barrow Haematite Steel Company, an integrated industrial powerhouse that dominated the landscape. For those born into a post-industrial world it is almost impossible to imagine the drama and vitality of those industries. The steelworks with its glowing smelting ovens and rivers of fire, sparks flying like fireflies, giant towers pumping smoke and steam into the sky above, the sharp tang of liquid metal, the deafening throb of the metal presses. At night the drama was amplified, the sky alive with changing colours as the light seeped upwards from the white-hot furnaces. On the coast at Barrow the Admiralty cautioned sailors that ‘The navigational lights are not always easy to distinguish, on account of the glare which sometimes emanates from the iron-works; the glare from the iron-works at Hindpool, has occasionally been seen from distances more than 15 miles westward of Walney Island.’ In more recent times schoolchildren would gather at Hindpool on dark winter evenings, to watch the slag being tipped, like lava from a volcano. Infernal visions of what, in the 19th century had been portrayed as ‘a new industrial sublime.’
The rise and expansion of the town of Barrow was sudden and startling, leading one commentator, the Bishop of Carlisle to described it as ‘One of the miracles of our time; I look upon it with that same sort of wonder with which some people regard the pyramids.’ But ultimately its dependence on a single industry was to have grave social consequences. When the Hindpool furnaces were intermittently shut down due to competition and dwindling iron ore reserves, thousands were thrown into poverty. Eventually, after decades of uncertainty, threats of closure and mini-revivals, Barrow’s iron and steel industry came to an end. The ironworks closed in 1963 with the loss of over 700 jobs; the steelworks finally stopped production in 1984. Although both had long ceased to be main players in the town’s economy, their passing was a huge symbolic blow.
The Barrow slag bank was said to be the longest in Europe having consumed around 9 million tons of industrial waste. Weaving through the site were a series of rails, iron tendrils along which rattled locomotives depositing the slag. In 1959, when the company moved from steam to diesel, new engines were ordered from Hunslett in Yorkshire. A representative from Hunslett came to Barrow to assess the works requirements and joined the train driver on a routine slag run. Halfway up the slagbank the Yorkshireman insisted on disembarking. ‘Nay lad,’ he called to the driver ‘I never ride an engine where the seagulls fly lower than the train tracks!’.
Attempts in the years after the closure of the works to reclaim the slag for various uses failed not least due to the concentration of contaminates such as arsenic and to prevent leaching a layer of earth was dumped over it. In the decades since this has transformed itself into an ecologically rich mosaic, colonised by rare and specialist pioneer species, which grow on ground low in nutrients. This post-industrial landscape in some respects replicates a limestone environment with an artificial escarpment providing shelter from the strong westerly wind. Rare plants found here include the Bee Orchid which derives its name from its main pollinator, a species of bee which is thought to have driven the evolution of the flowers. To attract the bees that will pollinate the plant, its flowers mimic their appearance, with pink sepals like wings, and furry, brown lips with yellow markings. Also nationally important is the parasitic Common Broomrape which grows out of the roots and feeds off members of the pea family.
Yellow kidney vetch or woundwort with its clusters of small, yellow flowers sitting atop little woolly cushions is found in great swathes on sheltered parts of the slagbank. This is significant as the exclusive food source of the rare Small Blue butterfly, whose numbers are growing steadily on the site. Other more common plants are Lady’s Bedstraw and Hedge Bedstraw whose frothing yellow and cream flowers attract the remarkable Hummingbird Hawkmoth. Alongside these are Ox-Eye Daisies, the elegant pale cream spires of Wild Mignonette, Rest Harrow, Portland and Sea Spurge and the exquisite Common Centaury, a member of the gentian family, whose delicate pink flowers close during the afternoon. Swathes of Quacking Grass are found everywhere amongst the industrial detritus and ferns cling to the sheltered underside of this most unnatural scarp. However, one less welcome species is the non-native Sea Buckthorn an invasive shrub planted by the local council no doubt to help stabilise the banks. It spreads rapidly forming dense thickets choking out other plants.
Knee deep in flowers and grasses looking across the corrugated sands to the north end of Walney, the Duddon and the high blue fells to the north, and the old farms of Ormsgill and Sowerby with their small, hedged fields, singular survivals of a pre-industrial world, it is all too easy to forget where we are. Look southwards towards Barrow, this in reality is the context to this edgeland, a backdrop of ongoing hardship, unemployment and limited possibilities. According to the Royal Society of Arts index 2016, Barrow was placed first in the category ‘Assets of Landscape and Natural Heritage’ across England. But it was ranked 162nd for how people use this landscape, revealing how unemployment and a fractured sense of place change one’s relationship with the landscape.
The Millom poet Norman Nicholson wrote much about the impact of de-industrialization in communities that had grown up around a single industry. He saw iron production as essentially a rural industry, the harvesting of a crop which unfortunately does not renew itself. Its failure leaves a sense of disconnection, with the communities it supported seen as disposable as the industries they served. This he expressed powerfully in his poem ‘On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks’:
They cut up the carcass of the old ironworks Like a fat beast in a slaughterhouse: they shovelled my childhood Onto a rubbish heap.
Fifty years ago Nicholson used the slagbanks as a metaphor for the industries themselves, dead and dry with the impermanence of a drift to snow. Today, with the benefit of that most valuable ingredient, time, what has bloomed from the white-hot furnaces of Hindpool is something very much like hope. Beyond evidence for the extraordinary tenacity of nature, Barrow Slagbank is a place of resolved contradictions, where the seemingly stark contrast between industry and nature blur and collide, to produce the rarest of wonders in a damaged world. Here on a June afternoon I saw my first Hummingbird Hawkmoth, a haze of wings around a fat, furred body as it darted purposefully between the patches of Bedstraw. A slightly bizarre product of convergent evolution it is recognised as a symbol of good luck in many cultures. Perhaps there is another metaphor busily at work here, one which unites both nature and community in a reawakened sense of purpose.
With special thanks to Roger Holme for his fascinating introduction to the flora of the Slagbank.
First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine June 2023.