Walk the signed footpaths around Frant for long enough and you start to notice the water. Long, narrow ponds held back by earth banks. Streams cut deep into steep little valleys. Woods that seem to have been managed with unusual seriousness. None of it looks industrial. Almost all of it once was.
Everything an ironworks needed
The Wealden Iron Research Group puts it simply: the landscape held all the raw materials. The clays of the Weald contained ironstone — locally called “mine” — and the sands and clays supplied stone and brick for furnaces. The woods provided charcoal. And the numerous small streams, running fast through narrow valleys, provided water power.
Those narrow valleys have a local name: gills. They are one of the defining features of the High Weald, and they explain a great deal. A gill is a natural place to throw an earth dam across a stream, build up a head of water behind it and use that water to turn a wheel.
Two booms, two thousand years
Iron has been worked here for a very long time. The Keep, the East Sussex archive, notes that ironworking uncovered in the Frant area shows settlement from at least 100 BC. The Weald was a major iron-producing region under the Romans, and again, more famously, in Tudor and early Stuart times.
Early smelting used small clay bloomery furnaces that produced a spongy lump of iron to be hammered into shape. The great change came at the end of the fifteenth century, when the blast furnace arrived from France. Blast furnaces ran hotter and longer, produced liquid cast iron, and needed water-powered bellows to do it. Forges, with water-powered hammers, then turned cast iron into wrought bar iron.
Hammer ponds and furnace ponds
That is why the ponds matter. A furnace pond fed the wheel that worked a furnace’s bellows; a hammer pond drove the great hammer of a forge. Many survive as the long, dammed lakes that now look like ornamental water. The dam, or bay, is often the clue: a straight, deliberate bank across a valley floor, sometimes with a road along the top.
Our photograph is of Furnace Pond near Horsmonden, a few miles across the Kent border. It is a fair example of the type: a sixteen-acre head of water that once powered an ironworks, now home to swans and very little else.
Closer to home, the Wealden Iron Research Group has recorded High Rocks Forge on the boundary of Frant and Speldhurst, one of the many water-powered sites in the parish’s orbit. The Group’s published bulletins and site database are the place to go for detail; we would rather point you to the people who survey these sites than embroider them.
Charcoal, coppice and the shape of the woods
Charcoal crumbles if it is carted far, so it had to be made close to the furnace. That meant woodland managed as coppice — cut on a cycle and left to regrow — rather than cleared. The High Weald National Landscape counts this long history of woodland management among the reasons the area still has so much ancient woodland. The iron industry did not strip the Weald of trees. In a sense it gave people a reason to keep them.
The ironmasters and the end
The industry made fortunes, and some of the larger houses of the district were built on them. It supplied bar iron, firebacks, grave slabs and, until the later eighteenth century, most of Britain’s cast-iron cannon. Then coke smelting, using coal the Weald did not have, moved the industry north and west. The furnaces went out; the ponds stayed.
One small Frant footnote. When St Alban’s was rebuilt from 1819, it was given iron arcade piers, iron window tracery and an iron west gallery. It is tempting to call this Wealden iron. The Sussex Parish Churches survey is more careful: by then the last local forge had closed, and it probably could never have cast pieces so large. The church is a monument to the material, not necessarily to the local trade.
Reading the traces
If you know what to look for, the landscape becomes legible. A straight bank across a valley. A placename with Furnace, Forge, Hammer or Cinder in it. A stream bed glinting with dark, glassy slag. Pits and hollows in old woodland where ore was dug. Please look from signed public rights of way and open access land only: many former ironworking sites are on private ground.
If you’re staying at Martins Farm
The estate sits in exactly this kind of country, of small fields, gills and old woods. We have no ironworking site of our own to show you, and we will not invent one. But a walk with this in mind turns pretty ponds into something more interesting: the remains of a working landscape that simply went quiet.