Aubrey says that the oak trees of Melksham forest, which once reached to the foot of the hill, were cut down in about 1634; there was thus not enough wood (for charcoal) to smelt it, and it remained unexploited until the 1850s.
[7][8] He also paid for a chemical analysis of many the ores (including a sample from Seend) which was published in a work by John Percy of the Royal School of Mines.
[12] However, fraudulent speculation over mineral rights in Seend and Ruabon led to the company's bankruptcy with liabilities of £43,000; Sarl re-acquired the site and by the end of January 1860 he had lit the first blast furnace and produced 200 tons of pig iron.
[4] The 1861 Census shows the influx of a number of workers from outside the area, including men from Ireland and the Black Country to work here.
"[6] A firm based at Midsomer Norton, near Radstock, bought the property in 1905 and extracted ore for a number of years, with most of the output going to South Wales.
The ore was calcined by the 'New Seend ironworks' to remove the earthy residues, and shipped to cities such as London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Swansea.
This geological layer was formerly well-known for its ores found in Kent and Surrey which had been the basis of the Wealden iron industry since earliest times.
But the scarcity of timber to make charcoal for smelting, allied with the introduction of coke in other regions brought an end to production by the late 18th century.
[20] An analysis of the Seend ore collected by Samuel Blackwell and shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition includes the following: Blackwell, who was much involved in the Seend quarry and ironworks, had explored the Northampton Sand shortly before the 1851 Exhibition and had discovered an extensive deposit of similar brown hematite which was shipped for smelting to South Staffordshire, Derbyshire and South Wales.