Along the Moors - Granville Nature Reserve

Industrial Heritage

At the northern edge of the Reserve, the ruins of Muxtonbridge Colliery (closed in 1912) provide a stark contrast between the decline of the coalfield and its regeneration as a habitat for wildlife. Cloaked by the woodland that has now enveloped the site, the imposing shells of the pit’s winding and pump-engine houses form a prominent reminder of the industrial scale operations that once went on here, while track from the extensive mineral railway system that served the mine and the wider coalfield can also be traced in the undergrowth nearby. Yet, at the other end of Granville, there is arguably an even more striking monument to the Lilleshall Company’s dominion over the area…

The Lodge furnaces, which opened in 1825, were once among the most productive in Europe and became famous for the quality of their cold-blast iron. The furnaces took their name from the Old Lodge, the former Leveson family home that previously occupied the site, which originally lay within the bounds of a medieval deer park that had belonged to the Abbots of Lilleshall Priory. The five furnace towers became a notable local landmark but closed in 1888 when production was switched to Priorslee. Despite their subsequent demolition, the huge sandstone walls of one of the charging ramps (where materials were tipped into the top of the furnace) has survived, while the basin of a canal branch that served the site remains in situ nearby. It formed part of the Donnington Wood Canal (the first inland waterway in Shropshire), which was constructed by Earl Gower in the mid-1760s to enable easier carriage of raw materials between the industrial sites on his estate and later became part of a network that connected the whole coalfield to the River Severn.