Bonawe Ironworks

Richard Ford's Newland Company built the works in 1753. Bonawe offered two things its Cumbrian owners needed: extensive woodland that could become charcoal and enough falling water from the River Awe to power furnace bellows. Ships brought iron ore from Cumbria and limestone from Ireland, while a quay, stores, furnace, workers' housing and manager's house formed a remote but connected industrial settlement.

About twenty experienced furnace workers came from Cumbria. They received stone homes, grazing plots and schooling for their children, but initially spoke a different language from many local Gaelic workers. Around 600 seasonal charcoal burners cut and stacked timber across Argyll, fired it slowly and lived near their woodland work in simple huts. The workforce later raised Britain's earliest monument to Admiral Nelson after his death in 1805.

A channel carried river water to a wheel that worked the bellows. Ore, charcoal and limestone were stored dry, weighed at the charging house and tipped into the furnace. Continuous cold air helped smelt the ore, and molten iron ran into moulds in the casting house. Most became bars for shipment and further working elsewhere, though Bonawe also cast cannonballs during the wars against Napoleon.

Visitors can still follow almost every stage of production through the two huge charcoal stores, ore shed, charging house, blowing house, furnace and casting floor. The water route, workers' housing and Lorn Quay extend that story beyond the furnace itself. Nearby coppiced woodland also holds the marks of repeated cutting for fuel, showing that the industrial site spread through the surrounding landscape.

Bonawe employed hundreds and joined Highland timber and labour to an iron trade reaching across the sea. Coke-fired furnaces could produce more cheaply and eventually displaced its older method, yet Bonawe lasted until 1876 and outlived every other charcoal furnace in Scotland. Its completeness makes it possible to understand not only smelting machinery, but the shipping, housing, seasonal woodland work and heavy demand for fuel behind each casting.