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Several miles from the coast on land that reaches towards the edge of the Cumbrian mountains is the town of Cleator Moor. Along with a cluster of smaller neighbouring villages – Frizington, Moor Row, Bigrigg amongst them – it rose up in the mid-19th century to accommodate the incomers who by then were arriving in large numbers to work in the many mines that would eventually spread across this landscape, where the high-grade iron ore that had been discovered by local landowners and iron masters was extracted. Through the 20th century these towns and villages, like much of West Cumbria, suffered the effects of decline as mining slowly began to disappear and populations gradually thinned out.
In its heyday the West Cumbrian Iron Orefield drew people in from all directions – from places like Cornwall, Scotland, the Isle of Man, other parts of England and especially Ireland – during a population explosion that was so sudden, remarkable and focused upon one goal that it was compared to the California Gold Rush of the mid-19th century.
What the people who came to live in these places ended up digging for, though, was not gold but hematite. This was the mineral – as highly sought after and valuable as the Californian gold – that would be used in the iron and steel production that West Cumbria would become famous for in the 20th century. While it is the case that the smelting of iron in blast furnaces had taken place in several locations around West Cumbria from the early 18th century – in places such as Little Clifton, Maryport, Seaton and, indeed, Frizington – this was before the revolutions of the 19th century had led to technological advances in iron production that to all intents and purposes moved industry in its entirety onto a different plane.
From the 19th century onwards the volume of iron produced during the process of rapid industrialisation that spread across the world was of a different order of magnitude – measured in the hundreds of thousands of tons rather than hundredweights – to what had existed before, and due to the development of new production processes, it would ‘tip the balance of material civilization’ as the human world was refashioned with the help of iron, steel and other metals. What was taking place in West Cumbria, in other words, was part of an event – ‘the event of events’ in the words of historian Fernand Braudel – that might have spawned entire histories of the role of iron in the evolution of humanity, if historians had not been so bedazzled by the stories of kings and queens. The deposits of hematite in West Cumbria were of the highest grade in the British Isles and fed directly into the processes developed by engineer and inventor Henry Bessemer to produce steel in West Cumbria directly from pig iron using the converter that he developed and which set the standard in steel production until the middle of the 20th century.
Ordnance Survey maps from the turn of the 20th century show West Cumbria as a place pockmarked with mines and linked by a network of railway lines that had been built to move ‘the vast output of iron ore, coal, limestone, and pig iron’ that poured out of its countless mines, quarries, and blast furnaces. In Cleator Moor – the largest town in the iron orefield – it was once said that in every garden there was an iron mine. If that sounds like an exaggeration, it was nonetheless true that buildings and churches were uprooted and relocated to allow mining to continue and that entire streets inhabited by miners and their families were dangerously undermined by the tunnelling and digging going on. It was not unusual, indeed, for houses to collapse as miners moved beneath the surface in search of the red stuff.
Cleator Moor, in a nutshell, was ‘built for iron, on iron, surrounded by iron and, eventually, almost destroyed by iron.’ As mining historian Dave Kelly has written, ‘the iron deposit was so near the surface that the people living in the houses above could hear the blasting beneath them and feel the vibrations.’ Yet daily life, and the work of mining, went on regardless.
Beyond its peak years in the mid-to-late 19th century, hematite mining had shrunk into particular locales and continued on a much smaller scale well into the 20th century. The Cleator Moor-born artist Conrad Atkinson recalled growing up in a place that had been ‘coloured by the vast hidden body of iron ore under the town’, which inevitably made its way above ground and into the air people breathed and, indeed, the cultural atmosphere of the town. There were ‘paths lined with crystals from the mines, crushed red gravel on the footpaths through the town’ and ‘doorstops of polished hematite beside the reddened doorsteps.’
The iron orefield came to be associated with the colour red because of the visible evidence of hematite so close to the surface. It is not surprising that long before it had been used in the production of iron it was, for millennia, mined for its artistic uses. Indeed, traces of hematite are found in the oldest known cave paintings, such as those discovered in the 20th century at Lascaux in France, as well as in the canvases of more modern painters. The latter produced red paint by grinding the hematite ‘with mortar and pestle into a fine reddish powder’, which was then ‘mixed with feldspar, vegetable oils, or animal fats, to give it different shades.’ Atkinson, an artist in the making, was struck by the colour: he thought of the miners he grew up amongst as ‘the redmen’, who could be seen arriving home from work with their clothes transformed by the fine red dust ‘into glittering fine silk’ as if they were wearing ‘postmodern haute couture’, and armed with ‘red offcuts of pit props’ to stoke the fire at home.
Today, Florence Arts Centre, which has taken over the site of the former Florence Mine, makes and sells its own Egremont Red paints, inks and pigment, containing hematite from its own grounds.