Maps This is a work in
progress |
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While researching my family, I have been surprised at the number of
people involved in mining, as I never considered Furness to be a mining
area. Growing up in Barrow, I remember Vickers and the iron works,
and if I think about it there were old pits around, but they were
ancient. I suppose to a twelve year old playing on the spoil heaps
round Yarlside, the mines were of the same period as the remains of
Furness Abbey not somewhere my Grandfather would work.
Even as a twelve year old, I loved maps so it was natural for me to turn to maps to try to find out why so many people worked in the mines - and why the mines all vanished again. And being into computers, I naturally turned to the Web to supply the information. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of old maps you can find on-line (even if some of the quality is not great), and I have pulled extracts out of most of the better ones on these pages. Click on any of the extracts to see the original source pages.
The Furness peninsula is an area of reasonably fertile land which is
bounded by the rivers Duddon and
Leven and the southern edges of the Lake District. This made it an
ideal place for an Abbey, but meant the industrial revolution was somewhat
late in arriving. The areas of sand and mud restricted access for large
ships, with quays limited to one at Ulverstone and one at the Pile of
Foudrey (Roa Island). Small boats could also get up to Kirkby Pool, and this was
the original transport route for the Burlington Slate Company which
supplied slate to the expanding towns of Manchester and Liverpool.
There was also a small iron industry using the very high quality iron ore
found locally - this giving the local stone it's deep red colour. The
ore was often overlain with a layer of limestone, which with wood Further evidence that horse and foot were the main ways of travel is
shown by the route of the turnpikes. The
original land-based transport routes relied on crossing the sands, from Slyne (Hest
Bank) to Cartmel, from Lower Holker to Ulverston, and from Ireleth
to Millom. The Despite what's shown on the map above, the turnpike did not turn
sharply right in Ulverston but in This map also shows the relative importance of Aldingham and 'Much Urswick', especially when compared with Barrow which at that time was an island rather than a town. Barrow started growing as a town when the railways arrived and started demanding steel by the mile. Furness had the high quality iron ore and the limestone to produce that steel - yet strangely the first railway bypassed Barrow for the more traditional harbour at 'the Pile of Foudrey' or Piel Channel as it's more commonly known these days. |
Interesting Links
Lancashire County Council Maps
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In fact, the first railway line in the area was built to
transport slate and iron ore from Burlington, Kirkby and Ireleth to Piel -
or more precisely to Roa Island on the other side of the channel. A
causeway linked the island to Rampside and new staithes were built ![]() As the demand for iron increased the cost of transhipment from train to
boat became prohibitive, and by 1840 plans were in place to run a railway
from Carnforth (already on the main London to Glasgow line) through to
Furness and on to Millom, Workington and eventually through to
Carlisle. The biggest hold-up to this was bridging the three
estuaries - the Lune, Leven and Duddon. As early as 1840, Archer was showing an expansion of this railway,
with branches to Ulverston and Barrow and an extensive viaduct across the
Duddon. As maps of that period always respected County boundaries,
we cannot say whether this line terminated at Millom or continued up the
Cumberland coast. We do know that the pressure was on the Furness railway to extend up the
coast - the Carlisle and Egremont railway had plans to extend South, so
the Furness laid it's own tracks from Egremont down to Millom ready for that viaduct.
By about 1850, the viaduct had been abandoned in favour of a simpler
bridge further upstream, whilst the map by Wyld (which Barrow BC claim to
be '1840s') shows not only this bridge but also the two viaducts to
the East, and the railway connecting straight through to Carnforth Whilst no doubt there were very good financial arguments for building it, the Lakeside line is often regarded as being James Schneiders private railway. After making his fortune from Iron, he moved into a large house at Bowness and commuted by steamer and railway to Barrow. The Broughton to Coniston line, on the other hand, was a working line mainly intended to bring slate down from the Coniston fells. It was also popular with visitors, attracted by Ruskin, and by Wordsworth's Daffodils. Wordsworth himself was against railways because they gave the working class access to beauty they could not appreciate - “Let then the beauty be undisfigured and the retirement unviolated” (Wordsworth's Arguments Against the Kendal and Windemere Railway)
We have wandered round Furness looking at railways, but haven't yet seen much of the family. Click here to see how they tie in together. |