The reason of this marvellous neglect of what has since proved one of our main sources of wealth lay in the enormous consumption of timber which the old smelting processes entailed. The charcoal used in producing a single ton of pig-iron represented four loads of wood, and that required for a ton of bar-iron represented seven loads. Of course, the neighbourhood of a forest was an essential condition to the establishment of ironworks; but wherever such an establishment was effected, the forest disappeared with portentous rapidity. At Lamberhurst, on the borders of Kent and Sussex, with so trifling a produce as five tons per week, the annual consumption of wood was two hundred thousand cords. The timber wealth of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex--which counties were then the centres of our iron industry--seemed menaced with speedy annihilation. In the destruction of these great forests, that of our maritime power was supposed to be intimately involved; so that it is easy to understand how, in those days, the development of the iron manufacture came to be regarded in the light of a national calamity, and a fitting subject for restrictive legislation! Various Acts were passed towards the end of the sixteenth century prohibiting smelting-furnaces within twenty-two miles of London, and many of the Sussex masters found themselves compelled, in consequence, to break up their works. During the civil wars of the seventeenth century, a severe blow was given to the trade by the destruction of all furnaces belonging to royalists; and after the Restoration we find the crown itself demolishing its own works in the Forest of Dean, on the old plea that the supply of shipbuilding timber was thereby imperilled. Between 1720 and 1730 the ironworks of Worcestershire and the Forest of Dean consumed 17,350 tons of timber annually, or five tons for each furnace.
'From this time' (the Restoration), says Mr Smiles, 'the iron manufacture of Sussex, as of England generally, rapidly declined. In 1740 there were only fifty-nine furnaces in all England, of which ten were in Sussex; and in 1788 there were only two. A few years later, and the Sussex iron-furnaces were blown out altogether. Farnhurst in Western, and Ashburnham in Eastern Sussex, witnessed the total extinction of the manufacture. The din of the iron hammer was hushed, the glare of the furnace faded, the last blast of the bellows was blown, and the district returned to its original rural solitude. Some of the furnace-ponds were drained and planted with hops or willows; others formed beautiful lakes in retired pleasure-grounds; while the remainder were used to drive flour-mills, as the streams in North Kent, instead of driving fulling-mills, were employed to work paper-mills.' The plentifulness of timber in the Scottish Highlands explains the establishment of smelting-furnaces, in 1753, by an English company at Bunawe in Argyllshire, whither the iron was brought from Furness in Lancashire.