In 1240 the abbey, which owned the eastern side of the lake, but not the lake itself, got leave from the baron of Kendal to put boats on the lake of Coniston for fishing and carrying. The carrying was chiefly of timber for building, but the tops and branches were no doubt used for charcoal. That on the other shore the smelting works were creeping up the valley is seen from the grant, before 1282, of William de Lancaster to Conishead Priory of the dead wood in Blawith for charcoal to supply the canons' bloomeries--for it was not only Furness Abbey that dealt in iron; and, indeed, more bloomeries exist on the side that did not belong to the abbey than on the shore that did. Thus in the thirteenth century we infer that smelting went on by Coniston Lake shore well up the west side.
On the east side there is a remarkable coincidence between the sites of Furness Abbey "parks" (or early clearings for sheep farms) and the bloomeries we find there. Near Selside Beck, where slag has been found, is Waterpark--anciently Water-side-park, apparently the earliest of the abbey sheep farms. Above Parkamoor Beck bloomery is Parkamoor--the sheep farm on the moor. Above Beck-leven bloomery is Lawson Park, the latest of the Furness Abbey sheep farms. I think the inference is that when the land was cleared they put sheep on it, and went up the lake to the next beck for the site of their bloomery. What we know for certain is that in early times the valley of Coniston was thickly wooded, but by the time of the dissolution of the monastery, High Furness had been nearly denuded of timber.
After the dissolution of the monastery, the commissioners of Henry VIII. let part of the woods of Furness Fells to William Sandys and John Sawrey, to maintain three smithies, or combined smelting and hammering works, for which the rent was £20. Less than thirty years later, in 1564-5, these were suppressed, because it was represented that the woods were being wasted, and the £20 rent was thenceforward paid to the lord of the manor by the customary tenants as "bloomsmithy rent."
The tenants of High Furness were allowed to make iron for themselves with the loppings and underwood, which may account for some of the small bloomeries. But by this time an improved and larger furnace was beginning to come into fashion, and in the seventeenth century we find that one such existed at Coniston at the Forge, between the Black Bull and Dixon Ground. It is mentioned in 1650 by the German miners, and by Sir Daniel Fleming in 1675. In 1750 it was turning out eighty tons of bar iron a year, and in 1771 Thomas Tyson is mentioned as the ironmaster (George Bownass' accounts). This would suffice for the needs of the neighbourhood, while at the same time the Deerpark, which we know was stocked in the seventeenth century and probably was preserved in the sixteenth, would make impossible the carrying on of smelting at Waterpark bloomery, which is within it, and at Springs, close to it. The relics from Peel Island, associated with iron works, seem to be mediæval, and the isolation of a forge on an island, as at Rampsholme in Derwentwater, implies that protection was sought, which would hardly be needed in Elizabethan and later times hereabouts. The conclusion seems to be that many of the little bloomeries are mediæval; that at Stable Harvey, perhaps the work of Conishead Priory after the grant of 1282, and those in Monk Coniston, the work of Furness Abbey.