Watercourses

The Coalbrookdale Watercourses Project is a long term programme of restoration, enhancement and management for the system of relict water power features that survive in Coalbrookdale, within the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site.

Ironbridge Archaeology is one member of a wide-ranging interdisciplinary team of engineers, landscape architects, environmental bodies and other consultants, brought together under the management of the Borough of Telford and Wrekin. Our involvement with the project has extended over many years, and has included desk-based assessment, field survey of the culverted system, and excavation of features associated with the supply and management of water. Our results have fed back into the strategy of repair and interpretation, and have provided important new information about the way in which the system developed over the years.

Our other research projects - such as the CHART programme and Upper Coalbrookdale Survey - have also added information to, and been supported by, elements of the Coalbrookdale Watercourses Project.

It is clear that much of the the Coalbrookdale watercourses system was established by the end of the sixteenth century, and was further developed in the seventeenth century. By the end of the second decade of the eighteenth century the system was at its peak, with six pools supplying water power to four forges and two blast furnaces. In the later eighteenth century a pumping engine was installed to recycle water. By the early nineteenth century however the whole Coalbrookdale complex was in decline, and the great pools were gradually filled in and the watercourses culverted beneath new buildings.

Further information about the development of the Upper Forge can be found here, and more about the role of the Upper Furnace Pool can be found here.