Redlode

Iron was worked at Redlode long before coal changed the county. Its bloomeries appear in accounts from the 4330s, some forty men over the whole field, and the families who worked them are unbroken down to names still on the Enginewrights' roll; it remained, for a century and a half, a village trade and nobody thought of the place as a mineral county. Redlode also had a building stone, hard and dark grey, that weathers superbly and is wretched to work. The bed was exhausted by about 4400, as Ned Dunn's workings book records, but before that it built the Black Stone quarter of Sarrum, which has been repaired ever since because nothing can replace it.

Today Redlode is a leat, two engines and a hundred and forty men on the Wold's western shoulder, four generations of the same families, whose cottages are freehold, held since before the expansion. Unlike every other pit village in the county they are nobody's tenants, and it shows in sound roofs, in the way strangers are spoken to, and in the fact that Redlode has never struck or been asked to. Its iron is the staple metal of the Cambridge yards and the local smiths. The iron lies in veins and is chased wherever it runs, so the old workings form a four-generation tangle that has never been mapped. The New Lode, a mile below, was opened in 4571, partly, says Lode-Captain Ambrose Kite, because the old galleries had become impossible to work. It is company ground in every respect, the opposite of Redlode, and the two villages do not intermarry.

Redlode's losses go unrecorded. Lode failures in 4583 and 4604 sent about ninety households to Sarrum or other workings within weeks, and no authority wrote it down. As early as 4541 an Enginemead enginewright, taking orders for pumps, asked what would become of the Redlode men when the last bloomery went cold. The dust of the workings kills men slowly, as it does everywhere in the hills. After rain the Redbank Flash below is ringed with iron-red water washed off the disturbed ground above the village.

A company sent underground here should know which kind of ground it is entering. Coal workings are planned, owned, officered and ruled; Redlode's iron galleries are none of these and are entered on the memory of men whose fathers cut them. Kite will tell you which is which, but not quickly. Be civil to the freeholders: they answer to no office and owe you nothing.