Research conducted in 1993 by landscape archaeologist Tom Gledhill showed that Ivelet Wood on the lower slopes of Beale Hill, north of Muker, had been a site of a significant wood-burning industry.
Gledhill’s Ivelet Wood Project included excavations and was conducted as part of research for his 1994 PhD thesis A Woodland History of North Yorkshire. In the wood around Arn Gill, he identified six or seven remains of chopwood kilns, otherwise known as elling or elding hearths from the Old Norse word eldr ‘fire’, and 31 remains of charcoal-burning platforms. Beyond the wood, in part of the slopes deduced to have been formerly part of an extended woodland, another 19 abandoned charcoal platforms were found.
Chopwood kilns burned brash and twigs to dry more-substantial pieces of cut brushwood to produce a more-effective wood fuel, sometimes called white coal. It is known from documentary evidence that this kiln-dried wood was used as fuel in the early lead smelt mills in the period 1575 to the mid-18th century. The preferred fuel then changed to actual coal. It’s thought that charcoal was used as fuel in the process of re-smelting lead slag to extract any remaining metals.
Radio-carbon dating of samples from Gledhill’s excavations of one chopwood kiln and one charcoal platform suggested that the fuel-making industry in Ivelet Wood ceased production in the late 17th century. The full report from the Ivelet Wood Project can be read here: A woodland history of North Yorkshire, PhD thesis by Thomas Gledhill, see pages 351-398.
SWAAG president Tim Laurie visited Tom Gledhill’s excavations at Ivelet Wood in April 1993 and took several photographs that were entered on the SWAAG database in 2013. To see this entry go to Mining 2 category PDF, record 704. For information and photographs by Tim Laurie about another well-preserved chopwood kiln at Arn Gill, just above Ivelet Wood, see Mining 1 category PDF, record 337.
