A Day of Iron and Coal

Saturday morning started out very inauspiciously. Due to my near miss with the train yesterday, we took all precautions with making it to the bus on time. However, we failed to realize that at 5:45 on a Saturday morning, nobody would be on the road so we arrived at the train station nearly an hour before hour train. So yeah, that was fun. Then we took the train into Telford and tried to figure out how to get to Ironbridge. We spent the next twenty minutes walking in circles around Telford following disagreeing signs to the bus before we finally found the station on the far side of the Telford Shopping Centre.

We finally found the correct bus and boarded with a bunch of elderly folk who all knew each other (we felt a little left out) and eventually made our way to Ironbridge. Say this for the people of Telford- the town made not be clearly marked out but everyone we met was incredibly friendly. We started off our day at the Museum of the Gorge which was built on an old iron warehouse right on the River Severn. That gave us a brief history of the area (and first introduced us to Abraham Darby) and gave a littel background on how to make iron.


We left the Museum of the Gorge, passed a Teddy Bear Shoppe and hiked up the hill to the Museum of Iron (there are ten museums in the Ironbridge/Coalbrookdale area and this was one of them). This gave us way more information on iron blasting and iron forging and coal and the Darby family than we ever wanted to know.


There was a beautiful Romanesque church on our way up at the hill. And the most beautiful YHA I had ever seen. (Unless it was the shabby building behind the magnificent one was the YHA... we weren't sure).

The coolest part of the Museum of Iron was the old viaduct and the restoted iron blaster which gave us an up close and personal view and idea of how the iron was created (although it was luckly not as hot as it would have been with all the furnaces burning).



After leaving the Museum of Iron, we headed back down the hill and then back up to the bridge itself. This was built by Abraham Darby III and put him into massive debt (he then died a few years later, leaving the debt to his son and his sister). The bridge is absolutely massive (for the time it was built) and had a toll booth on one end that nobody could pass without paying (even royalty- Prince Charles had to pay a toll when he came to visit the bridge in 1979).







Instead of spending the rest of the day in Telford, we headed out to Birmingham to wander around there while waiting for the train. We passed St. Philip's Church with the statue of the first bishop of Birmingham in front of it, which made for a cool picture.


We also spent some time in Victoria Square, where City Hall now stands (the library and the art museum is right behind it). The unique thing about Victoria Square is the massive courtyard area, the huge fountain and the very bizarre statues (two that look like Egyptian Sphinxes, a largest statue that looks like an Oscar statuette, a nearly naked women folded up on the fountain and of course, the statue of Queen V herself).


For all that's said about it, Birmingham was actually quite nice. We had dinner in a pub and luckily made it back home earlier than expected which was nice because I was exhausted after two verrrrryyyyy long days of day trips.