Kenfig: The Town That Vanished | Time Team | Timeline

hi everyone welcome to this timeline documentary just before you watch i want to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hits it's like the netflix for history it's got hundreds and hundreds of his documentaries on there and interviews with some of the world's best historians we're adding new stuff all the time for example today i'm filming in this one of the few remaining lancaster bombers for a show about the dambusters raid in 1943. if you want to know more about history hit follow the information just below this video or search online for history it and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show lovely day for a peaceful quiet walk in these tranquil woods deep in the heart of county durham but believe it or not this forest hides an industrial complex that was behind the birth of a revolution in this country although today this is pretty much all that's left of derwent coat a site making iron and steel that found its way right across the british empire we do know that there was an exciting hodgepodge of processes going on all over this one site a mini industrial revolution and we've got just three days to unravel it that is if we can get at the archaeology good thing i brought this [Music] before we can think about any trenches even i'm getting involved with the heavy duty pruning needed here at derwent coat 14 kilometers outside newcastle deep in the derwent valley we know they made iron and steel here from the 18th century but derwent copes barely on the radar when it comes to industrial britain only this steel furnace has been dug and restored by english heritage so it's the rest of the site we're here to investigate hidden under all this camouflage is a complex that was a toured a force in an emerging british steel industry francis everyone's been putting in loads of work and we haven't even started yet is it going to be worth it it is tony i mean okay it looks like idyllic woodland but actually under our feet you've got some of the earliest iron producing and steel producing sites in the country the industrial revolution is all happening here it's incredibly exciting mark if this place is so important why is it in such a state by the very nature of the terrain tony you can see why it's a very difficult site to keep on top of the great news we've got the time team in this week and we're going to do some work and find out you know and expand our knowledge but if this is iron and steel making where's all the big chimneys and all the great rusty hulks of the machinery all we've got is two foot higher walls well yes but tony we're dealing with iron and steel making in the 18th and early 19th centuries and that's a much smaller scale process than the big iron and steel works of the 20th century okay that's the history but what do we know about the archaeology it's incredibly complicated now you can see here the wall of a building that wall there and we're gonna put our trench across over here to the road like that so that's there yeah from the far side of that wall through the wall yeah through this hole through here yeah and then straight out in that direction tony go on quicker this way yeah you're winding me out all the way to here yeah further to that flag to here to there that'll be the corner of the building i hope under the road and that's going to be the size of the trench yes it is i'll have to get my streamer out again wouldn't i well it's a good job we've got a few walls to go on because this place isn't exactly filling geofizz with much enthusiasm what ideal survey conditions without being able to survive an open area we can't really do anything but with the diggers filing in we're not hanging around for geophys we're opening our first huge trench here over these earthworks we want to work out how many buildings there are what went on inside them and how they relate to these peculiar water channels or elites which seem to run through them before the machine's even broken the surface they're finding archaeology everywhere there's masses of stuff in it mashes and masses of stuff and phil's already thinking bigger francis is there any any sense in in widening out a bit we're just running along the bloody yeah put an extension out a bit more of that so let's see where the wall really is did listen to my words of coin council not often you take notice of anything always hey all right phil well done but getting to the bottom of what's in this trench is crucial because processes developed here supplied the nuts and bolts of everyday life it's quite a relief to get out of the forest because they've got horse flies the size of 50p pieces in there but i've got a good excuse to be here which is that marilyn has put together this great big pile of stuff which is essentially the products that would have been made out of the metal that they were creating here what's this funny thing it's a bit like a pub sign yep that's the right way up but it really was for hanging kettles or cauldrons by the fire so you could swivel it again sat in a socket you can swivel it so that your kettle or your quadrant is on the fire and when it's boiling you take it off every household would have had one of those so what on earth is this well you've got to turn it the other way up and yeah like that so you've got the cutting edge there yeah that fitted into a hook on the top of a wooden block and if you move that up and down oh this is a blade isn't it yeah you're using it as a fulcrum and what you made with this tony are clogs really it's the cutting the wooden patterns for clogs in a way all these things are a snapshot aren't they of what life would have been like for ordinary people once they started using much more metal that's absolutely right from plows to swords toast racks to rails metal transformed society but this lot consists of iron and steel and there's a difference between the two processes irons made from iron ore that's melted and hammered but it's malleable and blunts easily steel's simply a much purer form of iron that's been melted and hammered differently and it keeps its sharpness a lot of these processes would have taken place at different times and in different places on the site they would you have to think of the site as almost like a mad scientist workshop because you've got the iron masters fiddling around with with the recipes really it's the start of the birth of the science and metallurgy so they're learning lots of new things actually understanding what's going on and so to some extent they are experimental sites and they're just trying anything to get ahead of the neighbor and it'll be our job to find out who these people were what they were doing and when they were doing it and why all of this means we've got a difficult job ahead because we could be looking for any number of different types of furnaces which made the different types of iron and steel one furnace we know we've got is the cementation furnace it converted iron into steel by cooking it for two weeks when that steel was welded it could be used for swords and tools we could have a finery chaffery where poor quality iron was melted and hammered making wrought iron for nails and horseshoes then there's the crucible furnace that melted steel to make it purer perfect for springs and razors [Music] if we can find the different buildings we can track changing metal technologies and build up a complete picture of the site good job we've got geophys to point us in the right direction i mean we often complain about sites but these are the most difficult um to be honest you've got so many trees so many nettles the undergrowth all the leaf matter i mean the problem is you've got some standing buildings but there's so much rubble inside them that spread around we can't do a lot in those so what can you do we're going to do a bit on this open path and actually get a transect right through the woods see what the variations are like um then i'm sort of up for ideas to be honest twelve o'clock day one and john's deer fizzing the path exciting then luckily in phil's trench they're going great guns without the aid of gfs ah look at that now look that edge yeah is carrying on it's that wall look there's this one going down it is a big mound in the vegetation yeah go on keep going it's going right on out there yeah we're in the road now but you can't see it well that's the face of it so that's a very very good piece of advancement it is brilliant and we're on the inside now yep yeah bear in mind it may not have happened if we hadn't have actually had the forethought to widen the trench i owe that entirely to you phil thank you so after just a few hours phil's already inside the wall line of a quite sizable single building but minutes later it gets better oh bloody hell that that hidden demolition material that's burning which is great news it looks like phil's in the heart of a furnace just after lunch day one and just when you think everything's going swimmingly you discover it actually is you're gonna need a snorkel to excavate in there aren't you well we're certainly not going to be able to carry on as we are i mean the fact is we're well the soy is in the bottom of a valley you can see over there we are already below the level of the leak there and the water is just pouring in what do you think this thing is well we think it's actually probably the cellar part the basal part of a massive furnace so the floor would have been up here the cellar below would have been underneath our feet but it's only guesswork unless we get this water out we've got to keep going but we've got to get a pump once this water's drained phil can get back to his burnt bricks and establish what sort of furnace it is but to make metal as well as heat and fire you need water so to understand how water was used here stewart's gone straight into elite and he's hitting it with a stick very scientific so this is a pretty pathetic little trickle here but i mean in the past that would have been serious body of water that would have powered wheels wouldn't it i mean this is this is the whole power supply of this site it's part of a water management system but this water management system starts actually way up the valley up there about 400 meters that way and what they're doing is managing the water from the river diverting it through a long channel called a head race it's a four meter wide channel in a dead straight line to the end of the valley now that bit of water doesn't it doesn't look like much now but that was holding back a huge pond effectively stored water which then you could manage into narrow channels like this to turn a wheel very gently to deliver the power you needed but i mean to my eyes dude i mean if if that's a dam which i take a word it is this inner face here looks for all the world like like like the inner wall of a building doesn't it it does and you're right i'm sure it is but this may all be timber because we know a lot of these structures have timber timber framing effectively and you might have an open shed here with processing going on on that side we need to clean up the dam so we can get a good look at its structure and then open trench two around it because there seems to be a building attached to the back of the dam which could be industrial we'll also dig this man-made channel where we're looking for a water wheel according to the documents an iron works was established here in 1718 the first mention of a steel furnace comes in the 1740s which valued the site at a whopping 4 000 pounds do we know much about the people who are involved the actual steel making process is is introduced into the derwent valley by a colorful chap called william bertram he was german in origin and he went to sweden and he seems to have learned steel making in sweden because sweden is the leading steel maker at the time he seems to be heading back to germany and he is mysteriously shipwrecked off newcastle and he ends up in newcastle making steel and then he ends up here why do you say mysteriously shipwrecked well it seems all too easy doesn't it you've got an expert steal maker which you want in the valley and somehow or other he ends up here do you think he might have been poached i think he might have been poached and certainly the bertrams are here father and son for some time but all this needed money and investment and the possibility of people buying your stuff didn't it yeah well in the 1730s it's it's a real growth time for britain you've got a series of good corn harvests you've got a lot of people who are prepared to invest in industry and so you get the growth of the early industrial empires in this valley back at trench one phil's got his pump and is finding more evidence of his furnace [Music] trench two's also underway around the millpond dam you can't really see because it's under all this greenery but the water table is right here if i'd been here a hundred nod years ago i'd have been up to my neck in in the mill pond it didn't take long to clear the metals francis but you really get the picture of a complex water system here now don't you you do i mean it's been fabulously successful i think just getting rid of all that vegetation you really get a feel for it now look there's a photograph even now this is an extraordinary thing this is taken sometime between 1860 and 70. and it's looking in that direction now we don't know what's going on inside this building but look at this family here and they look pretty glam he's got a lovely top hat so he was probably quite a senior sort of chap but somewhere in here is that view that's really tantalizing isn't it i knew there'd be a photo but if we can pinpoint the exact spot this photograph was taken we could work out if those buildings are in our trench and what went on inside them i know just the man for the job [Music] so as stuart turns photographic sleuth phil's engineering a makeshift drainage system at his trench and five feet down it looks like he's ready to name our first industrial process phil supposed to get quite a lot of the water cleared then yeah i mean the most incredible thing about this is we are actually on the floor now so just underneath this water is the floor of this crucible furnace and you're confident that this is a crucible furnace pretty sure it is a crucible furnace but it's far far more complicated than that we don't know whether it's always been a crucible furnace or even for how long it's been a crucible for us we find that there are so many more phases of building and rebuilding that it is really really complicated we really don't know what's going on uh well i think i've got something that might help marilyn has just given me this really fascinating book it's by this bloke angerstein and he was around in the 18th century and he was an industrial spy and he came here snooping around and tomorrow we're going to see whether we can use this spy book to find out what we've got in our trenches and that'll be a first beginning of day two deep in the woods of derwent coat near newcastle where we're investigating an iron and steel works which started in the 18th century we've already opened three trenches and in phil's crucible furnace trench there's a slight technical hitch well that's a fair drop of water in there in it curry it is but we have the technology we have shall start it up [Music] nothing yet terry and there's another hitch where's the water kerry taking a devil of a lung and another ah that's known as a blocked hose in the business and it's not the only problem with this trench [Music] yesterday afternoon everyone was getting really excited because in this trench there was something which they were calling a crucible furnace and i was going oh wow that's really exciting except i've really got no idea what a crucible furnace is mike what is it all it is is melting iron and steel bars in a pot big tall pots and i've got one down here this is a crucible which we found yesterday and it would have been about three times the height of what we've got here steel bars inside carbon over the top lid on it jerry why do they bother to go through such an elaborate process because what you're really after is thing called clean steel steel with no slag in it so the great secret of this process is that you take these bars of steel from the cementation furnace put them into these crucibles raise them to 1200 degrees c the steel melts the slag inside also melts and floats to the surface so you've now got an ingot of clean steel and some debris how do you get to a heat like 1200 degrees centigrade well you do need a furnace and these these crucible steel furnaces consist of essentially a cellar where the furnace was which was fed by coal and on the floor above this is where the crucible was filled and then lowered into this really hot furnace but this is only one process of a whole load that went on here over what 1500 years oh this this is the last process to be introduced onto the site so we think this is about 1850. this is a fantastic discovery crucible steel was not only really top quality but could be made in much higher quantities than any steel beforehand with his pump now unclogged phil can crack on finding out how big this structure actually was [Music] at the far end of the site traces started digging the front room of a workers cottage hoping to find clues to the workforce who lived here i think that's the roof joists coming down so the whole thing's just kind of slid in we're hoping we might have some remnant of the floor left underneath elsewhere things are a little more frustrating at the mill pond where we're investigating the dam structure and looking for other industrial buildings so far we've got a bird's nest it's positively industrial what's more the archaeologists are getting excited about something we'd normally chuck on the spoil heap what they're over the moon about is this stuff and it's not kryptonite it's dirty old lumps of charred slag but here slag holds the key to what was being made the stronger the magnetism the more metal it contains attracting to it oh yeah quite a strong pulse so that we know is is slag yes but with a lot of metal in it so what we need to think about is what's it's associated with we've got an excellent example here because here we've got at the actual wall of the crucible and what's happened is the crucible is broken and out of it has flowed the steel from that was melted inside so again if we test that that's really sticking jerry will be analyzing this slag to assess the quality of the steel mixed in with it if it's not as good as stuff being produced in places like sheffield at the time it might be the reason work here eventually stopped but not everyone's enjoying the quantity of slag it's driven john round the bend and up someone's garden wall here this sums up our problem it's full of slag if i take a reading look several thousand units yeah if i do the same on the iron bar same thing same thing now this sums up the problem this material is everywhere i mean it's in effect masking everything i mean if we look at the results you remember we were doing a transect along that path yeah took us right through the middle of the site now i was hoping that we'd actually see a variation in the readings but as you can see we're just getting noise throughout the length of that path what you're showing there is the sheer scale of this thing i mean you couldn't have shown it any other way so your time hasn't been wasted well i must admit i was ready to go home well i am ready to go home i don't think so john there's a day and a half to go yet meanwhile jerry has taken an angle grinder to his crucible slag and looks like he's got it out of phil's trench just in the nick of time i thought they were meant to be pumping it out not letting it back in look at that full running water what a is it slowing down i don't know no oh well we're out of pump all the time now yeah but we won't we the thing of it is we won't even be able to see the floor i had the floor uncovered until you started well i know you had the floor uncovered until you started clearing up your mess not my mess wow it'll run out at some stage yeah but i'll run out at some stage i think i'll leave them to argue this one out francis i haven't seen you all morning haven't things changed here much oh we've been running around like headless chickens the latest thing is that we find that the dam is largely composed of huge pieces of slag including blast furnace slag this is where naomi's excavating that's right down there what does that mean well that means that there must have been a blast furnace operating in this area when they built the dam but it doesn't necessarily mean that the blast furnace was here just because we found a pile of slag does it well yes if it's within the body of a dam then i think that does mean there was a blast furnace nearby is there any evidence written evidence not last here is here no this is brand new style absolutely this is really exciting as we might now have the one furnace we weren't expecting to find blast furnaces in northeast england can be as early as the 16th century iron ore and charcoal were put in the top and air blown into the base producing cast iron used for cannons and cauldrons but despite francis's confidence so far we've only got the slag and no structure luckily he's equally excited about something else look on the edge of this lead suddenly you come across proper pucker masonry and right in the middle of them there that iron bar can you see it no i thought it was a tree root i see what you mean i know yeah it's iron tony yeah yeah now that could be the axle for a wheel so what we got to prove next is is there a hole there for the wheel to revolve into but that is looking good isn't it it's looking very good yes few more digging to prove whether we've got a wheel pit or not [Music] over in trench one the safest thing phil can do right now is stop hitting things with his shovel it's a natural disaster mate what what's going on well we we just made a wonderful discovery we discovered a culvert and now we know that culvert's full of war looks like this disused leaked running through phil's trench was culverted over at some point unfortunately there's now a puncture in it that's one more recent maps but if you go back at the incident room stuart and henry are working out how all the leaks connect to understand the layout of the site looking at these deep valleys that come down the side the water from them has got to go somewhere and that boundary around the back is interesting it's on the old map that looks like a another leaked a water system that we haven't even looked at yet around the back if they can find the earliest leak it could lead to the very origins of this site [Music] industry put this place on the map so much so industrial spies came here in the 18th century they're very worried about what was going on in britain and all the processes that were going on and so spies from sweden and germany came over to make sure what we were doing in order to protect their own markets tell me about this bloke what's his name angerstein ah reinhold rooker angerstein he was german in origin he set up a steelworks in sweden and he decided in 1753 to make a tour of europe but particularly of britain in order to find out whether britain was catching up with sweden mind you he gave us some fantastic historical research oh yeah i mean his journal is absolutely fantastic what they're doing here is to produce out of the iron and the steel all sorts of tools and artifacts and a lot from this valley go to the colonies we know that virginia hoes were made here which must have been used in the tobacco plantations and then lots of bill hooks for cutting sugar cane so we can see this globalization of trade that's happening and angerstein is really our best source for that derwencoat's link with britain's slave trade is chilling as well as 150 tons of iron a year this site made a hundred tonnes of steel some of which went directly to the east india company back at trench two the team's been looking for evidence of this production and rakshas discovered the floor of a very dirty room oh lovely oh that's that's quite gritty isn't it very gritty almost almost sort of charcoal-like i wonder if we're in a charcoal store that's really good if we found that it wouldn't it well yeah why don't i leave you to clean it up and i'll come back okay around this spot they're also finding masses of roof tile looks like we've finally located the first building in this photograph this was the charcoal store which means this bit was probably a forge you can see the top of the dam in the picture and now it's been cleaned up it looks like it's made of all sorts of recycled material which has got theories flying thick and fast right we got two hours left of today and we got the whole of tomorrow so that's why i've assembled you to tell me what we do about this little miniature aladdin's cave here there is stuff here from blast furnaces we know that because we've had a look at the slag but slag alone doesn't make a blast furnace if it is it's a blast furnace that's been probably taken apart quite badly and then backfilled with a lot of reused material but there are other substantial structures this could be so this could be for instance a finery furnace yeah we've got one other small piece of evidence which appears to be a very small twee air which was the the end of the bellows where the air from the bellows went into the furnace it's small for a blast furnace it could be for a refinery well they seem to be agreeing the dam is made from a dismantled furnace but typical archaeologists they can't agree what type we need to clear more scrub and see what we've actually got and if it's a blast furnace then we'll have discovered the earliest industrial process on this site but stewart's on a quest for something earlier again stu what the heck's going on here well looking at this 1856 map and the possibility of a northern watercourse going round there yeah different watercourse for their tongue that building there on the end of what might be redundantly see that there that looks awfully like there might be a mill building there and i've had to look around the back and there's a piece and there's a ditch from this you can see these walls coming out so i'm getting to clear the whole lot off and have a decent look at it if stewart has got a mill it would pre-date the iron and steel works and could be why industry was attracted here in the first place because once there was a water system proven to work people tended to use and expand it at the other end of the site we're still looking for a wheel pit connected with later industrial activity while traces finish cleaning up the 19th century cottage what a wonderful floor in there oh it's lovely isn't it and it's in such good condition as well i mean that's the thing i know my first house had quarry tiles like this i can just imagine what it'd be like living in this place it's quite eerie actually what the remains of the ash pan you see there's one handle for it there and um and that's well it looks like a latch but actually you would have had a handle in that just to pull thing out when it was hot that's really nice but it's just it's collapsed with the weight of the rubble on it so that that's as they walked out of the house they left the ash they left the ash pan but it's so nice you know we concentrate down there on these big industrial buildings and for me it's so nice to do the house where they were living it's the heart of the place you know they were eating here they were sleeping here they were making love here everything was here this cottage is a really evocative snapshot of 19th century domestic life and it seems fantastic flooring was all the rage at derwent coat phil this trench has been a bit of a struggle what you got there in the end we've actually now punched a hole in the culvert and used the water to wash the bricks down here and it's been a very very good servant too it is a lovely floor isn't it it's a gorgeous brick floor you've even got names on some of the bricks here haven't you yeah i know this is what i think it's just so fantastic it really does bring you into touch with people what 100 200 years ago i mean here you've got very clearly ramsey and then ritzen in there but it is they are real people that existed so are you finished now oh if only i mean the crucial thing is we've always been happy this is the crucible furnace you see when we originally came here we thought that it extended along here and you'd have a load of individual bays where you could have actually placed the crucibles in to make the steel but we now think that we may actually have got the crucible furnace the wrong way around it goes this way so what's this thing here how will you see this could be part of the the original partitions that would have separated up the different bays of the furnace so what we've got to do now is shift all our spoil and extend the trench that way so you are going to shift 20 tons of spoil oh no i'm not but he is and after the day ian's had i'm sure shifting that will be a walk in the park it's been a fantastic day's work as phil's crucible furnace gets better and better but tomorrow it'll be all hands to the deck as we continue to look for proof of an industrial process we never imagined we'd find when we first came here if this dam is actually a recycled blast furnace it'll be the earliest ironworks on the site and the start of derwen coats industrial revolution beginning of day three here at county durham where we've traveled back in time and transformed this rural idle into a seeding mass of industrial activity in the 18th and 19th century at least we thought we were in the 18th and 19th century but stuart reckons he can push the date back even further what's up his sleeve we have a mention of a mill cornmill here in the 16th century late 16th century on the first map we've got of the site a building here which may indicate a mill site because we've got basically no channel coming down here a little channel down the side of the building so i i it's speculative but i would like to see what's going on in this building stu i have to say not everybody is yet convinced that there is an earlier mill here but how are we going to prove whether or not he's right well what i plan to do is start a trench down there across the center of the building on the floor over the wall onto the road and about here hang on how do you know there's a wall here and a road there have you just made that up uh yes with a bit of help from stewart's map so if the map's right then this is where the wall and the road would be well that makes sense isn't it there's no time to lose as the digger moves in to open the trench if it is a 16th century mill it would suggest early and successful water management making it an ideal location for the next three centuries of industrial activity phil's in the 19th century with his trench working out the direction and scale of his crucible furnace i think that might be the corner the inter so they get that wide which should be about that wood as well and with each scoop more clay crucible pot emerges jerry is still only midway through processing the crucible slag from phil's trench to find out how good the steel was after grinding it has to go through three types of acid before it can go under the microscope for the verdict [Music] so as jerry labour's away marilyn's been looking into derwen coates labor force recorded in the 19th century census what did people actually do who lived here well fortunately the census returns tell us the occupations which enable us to link them to the site so mike we've got a steel converter there we've got a roller and we've got a steel melter what's a steel converter in a steel melter steel converted they're working up at the cementation furnace just up the valley but the steel melter they're working with the crucible furnaces we've just been excavating so we can now put a name to the guy who was working where phil's trench is now he certainly can his name is joseph brown he's age 49 and he's got a wife called margaret who is 39. and over in the crucible trench phil's getting closer and closer to steel melter brown within less than a meter we've been digging here and now we've got really intense heat i mean look at the way these these bricks have been really really red and look at the color of the mortar as well i mean i think that those bricks are actually part of a a single structure i mean i think they are laid bricks and look you've got a very clear edge of all this material coming around here between the burnt material there and this black stuff on there but the really crucial thing that does really bring it home is not just the color of these bricks but look they're fused together i mean that's fantastic to me that's that that is the hot face of a crucible furnace the phenomenal amount of burnt brick means phil is definitely in the first crucible furnace bay they now need to clear even more of the trench to reveal its full size telly what ian that is looking like a nice section perfection perfection indeed and over where we're looking for a water wheel raksha also seems to be getting results we have a complete jumbo mess of stones that have obviously been reused and put on top but then we've got this really nice uniformed bit at the bottom there really nicely dressed stone what fascinates me is that lower one with the beautiful stonework i mean that's your original wheel here that is the evidence we're looking for that we do have a wheel here yeah that's crucially important so finally we've got the location of our water wheel but it's nothing to do with the crucible furnace which means it's evidence of other intense industry at derwent coat phil where you are yesterday afternoon you thought that those might be recesses to put crucibles in do you still think that oh it's absolutely undeniable now tony we we have got two of what we think are probably six recesses we've got a brick wall there brick pier and then a recess and the flu goes right the way through and comes up through there then we've got another brick pier and another recess with a flu coming up right the way through and then we've got another brick pier and another recess so the design is confirmed and where i'm standing really is is is the stockholm there's the engine room so where i've been taking the muck out they would have been shoveling the fuel in to create the fire and what's my bloke joseph brown doing the bloke lives in the cottage down there he's the crucible man he's standing pretty much where you're standing and with his cloth cap just like you he'd have been loading his crucibles into the furnace to make the steals what about this up here is this the same period no this is slightly later tony this is small scale forging going on here and we've got a census return from 1901 that mentions a spade forging spade making going on on the site so it looks like that's probably to do with that process so that's quite nice isn't it here we've got industry at its height and here we've got the end of the story on this side absolutely and as jerry has finally finished processing the crucible slag we can at last find out how skilled derwent coates workforce was at making crucible steel cool that's an incredibly vivid image jerry well looking at this image if you see that this this sort of the darker areas and then you've got these very white areas running around these edges and this tells me that this is what's called a hypo eutectoid steel it means it's a steel with about one percent carbon you couldn't get a better steel so in my view they are producing excellent quality high quality crucible steel hyper eutectic steels eutectoid oh nearly right crucible steel was used to make springs and pendulums and the continuing development of ever better metal was the driving force behind the industrialization of britain but if derwent coat kept pace technologically why did it decline well you can always rely on a historian and a map for answers up here we've got the toll road which went in in 1842 see on the map here i would have thought this would have given it a new lease of life to get their products out into the wider world well you hit the nail on the head there it's a toll road so any goods coming into the site or being taken out have to pay tolls and that would just add to their costs and even a hundred years earlier we know from angerstein that charcoal is coming in from many miles away and a horse load of charcoal cost four shillings and sixpence even then but i'm an entrepreneur over that period i've got a good water source i've got a huge mill pond i've got all those buildings down there why don't i just increase my production make more money pay the total charges and still continue to make profit in order to increase production you've got to change your power source so they're using big steam engines down in sheffield big steam engines powering a lot power more powerful machinery they can produce more and you just haven't got the space down here for a big steam engine but in the woods the experts are getting really animated about a process that potentially kick-started all metal production on this site [Music] ever since we first got here our archaeologists have been puzzling over this great hunk of masonry in the middle of our mill pond what is it how old is it none of them seem to know but francis has just summoned me here in his usual state of france it's high excitement what is it well actually tony this is quite urgent that isn't just a heap of rubble the structure there and that structure is potentially very exciting what do you reckon it is well tony we've got three stones over there which are part of a reused arch so what does that mean well an arch in a blast furnace is where they blew the air into it what sort of date about 1650. how do we prove it jerry we've got three bits of evidence the first is this large sheet of basically furnace lining where the slag inside the furnace has attacked the clay lining of the furnace it is far too big for any other structure i think other than a blast furnace the second piece of evidence is blast furnace slag we've been turning up this green blast furnaces which is typical of charcoal blast furnace in small amounts consistently from here and thirdly and most importantly we've got metal now if i can take a sample of this and prep it very quickly then i might be able to actually resolve with whether it is actually cast iron and if it's cast iron this is definitely a blast furnace so the urgency is that you want to get that under the microscope before we finish tonight yeah come on then it's now a race against time to get this metal processed and say whether it's from a blast furnace or not luckily the cavalry's arrived to help jerry out this is hard work it is i mean being realistic jerry we got an hour are we going to get a result do you think we'll get as far as we can i mean basically what we'll do is once we've got to this grit we'll go and have a look at it under the microscope when we get it to the microscope how do you distinguish between cast and raw time what we're hoping for is that we'll be in a sufficiently well prepared state to see a certain microstructure now what comes out of the charcoal blast furnace is a thing called grey cast iron and that's got one characteristic feature which are little flakes of graphite and these should show at this level of preparation so it's fingers crossed fingers crossed yeah graphite flakes graphite flakes graphite flakes graphite francis has gone mad flaked i don't even know what graphite flakes are i just hope they find some [Music] in stewart's trench he's found something that might just prove his crazy theory about a mill ian's coming down there i was giving up on this to be honest but just last thing we have a wall so that's that's the edge of a a wall of a stone building or something the other facing edge is just coming underneath the section here so it's a big old wall it's a substantial stone wall and it's different from all the other walls we've looked at as well because it's not fine it's not that sort of layered stone i mean these are boulders that they're using here to me these all points that you've got this early mill here i think it's absolutely fantastic i think ian deserves a pint of a pie i'll let you buy me i'm a yorkshireman fair enough stuart i'd take my hat off to you this discovery is evidence that derwent coat evolved from a site using water power to grind corn to a site harnessing that water to produce metal question now is whether jerry and francis can prove whether we've found that first metal process jerry i can't wait mate any any graphite flakes ah graphite do you know what graphite flakes look like um now those are i suspect graphite flakes i yeah i'm reasonably confident great so if you add that to the to the size and shape of the furnace lining and to that cast iron slag then it it really looks like we've got a a blast furnace doesn't it i i would say for definite quite honestly okay well that's fantastic it's superb i am so over the moon good well take the message what a result we've proved that before the pond was here it was home to a blast furnace it pushes iron making on this site back to the 1650s almost a century earlier than previously thought we've only got about half an hour left francis what do you think we've learned from the trenches we've put in i could tell you in two hours i mean we have learnt so much we got how people lived how they worked no it's all there and of course it all fits together that's a great fun of this i mean and i'm sometimes rude about stuart but he helps cement landscapes together we came here looking for an iron and steel works but what we've uncovered is a mini industrial revolution [Music] derwent coat might have been overtaken by big cities but metals developed and perfected here changed the very world we live in today not bad for three days work who's gonna be the bloke in the top hat that's me all that remains is for us to record our own memory of the site who's the ghost the lady in the crinoline pity you tony that's his wife time team's version of the only photograph of what was once here all you need is your top hat telling it to finish it off smile gotcha recorded for history

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 172,123

Rating: 4.8702106 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, time team, tony robinson, kenfig, vanishing town, archaeology, british history

Id: _JjIYsEYPEU

Length: 47min 49sec (2869 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020