Quicker heels raced down this vale on weekend visits nearly two decades ago, the runner open-mouthed, but not from lack of breath. So many roofless buildings, furnaces stamped into cliff faces, a chimney belching fresh air. My younger self had stepped into Somerset’s Ironbridge, a place where dereliction had worn a path back to beauty. I peeped through the ivy curtains of windowless windows at factory floors now peopled by forests of skinny birch, and at tumbledown walls topped with spreading bushes. Here was a greening by stealth.
In those days, the early internet offered nothing to explain the valley’s past as the site of ironworks making edge tools – the spades, shovels, sickles and hoes that cultivated and fed the county and beyond. But just a few weeks ago, an older form of communication rose up to inform visitor and resident alike: a giant information panel, with enough content to fill a novella. All too much to take in at once, so we decided to digest sections one journey at a time.
Last week, I read about workers with their noses to the grindstone, sharpening blades and shortening lives – few of them lived to see their 40th birthday. I turned away and then, such was the impact, I caught a whiff in my nostrils like that of metal flaking off. Eerie and very real, but maybe a deep memory dredged from childhood of my father filing his own tools.
Today I am on firmer soft ground, scrambling over a humic layer like I’m following an estate agent’s floorplan, rushing from room to room, forge to forge. Two hundred years ago, workers had lined the cliff face with brick walls, and in one compartment there is still the low rectangular recess of a fireplace, backed with blackened bricks.
I’m on my knees, spotting mouse droppings on a flat ledge, when I see something dark and pebble-sized next to them. It’s a surprisingly heavy object in my hand: a purplish-black bubble of iron. I must return it to its ledge, thinking of others before me and others to come who might feel this little weight of history.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
