IRONSTONE FORMATION OF THE FOREST OF DEAN. 219 
regard of their antiquity ; but, in all likelihood, by far the larger 
quantity of them were produced during the occupation of the Danes — • 
hence the common local name "Dane's cinders."* 
With the invention and introduction of the bellows, the air-bloomeries 
gave place to small furnaces called " blust-bloomeries," into which the 
air was artificially introduced ; at first by human and cattle labour, but 
afterwards by machinery, the furnaces being removed from the elevated 
situations before spoken of to the lowest levels, or where the confluence 
of several streams gave a lasting supply of water to move the water- 
wheels by which the bellows were worked. 
These blast-bloomeries, it may be said, formed the first real attempt 
towards the art of smelting, notwithstanding that not more than one- 
half the iron was obtained from the ores, tlius adding further to the 
large quantity of metallic cinders accumulated under the old process. 
With these furnaces, however, a considerable enlargement of the 
manufacture rapidly followed ; but the difficulty experienced in 
treating the ores, from their calcareous character, retarded the intro- 
duction of the blast-furnace proper for some time after its adoption in 
other districts. The earliest castiiiff made in the Forest, according to 
Mr. Mushet, bears date 1620. 
In an account professing to enumerate all the blast-furnaces in 
England, published about the year 1720, a date prior to the manufac- 
ture of pig- iron with pit-coal, it is stated that in Gloucestershire and 
Herefordshire, in and on the borders of Dean Forest, there were 10 
furnaces, thus showing this to be the only iron-making locality that, 
at that time, could bear comparison in importance with Sussex and 
Kent, then the largest district, and where there were 14 furnaces in 
blast, but which, together with the iron trade of those counties, have 
long since disappeared amid those strange industrial revolutions which 
the development of our coal-fields, the increasing scarcity of wood fuel, 
and the progress made in the invention and application of machinery, 
have produced in these and other localities of former manufacturing 
celebrity. 
Towards the middle of the 17th century, James I. was possessed of 
three blast-furnaces and two forges in the Forest of Dean ; and the 
* The sliig, from the ancient bloomeriea in Dean Forest, was formerly carried 
in large quantities to Bristol for tlie manufacture of blaclc bottles, the superior 
quality of which has been ascribed immemorially to the use of this material. 
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