If you ever want to shatter some sort of industrial revolution, production ideal foisted on the world through photographs by
Margaret Bourke-White,
Leni Riefenstahl, go visit the Blaenavon Ironworks. Even though it's presently a quiet location of partially ruined rocks in a hillside, you can easily imagine the hard, impossible, death accelerating work for no money that existed for decades.
Part of the complex. Furnaces of hell to the left, the water balance tower to the right. Blaenavon produced pig iron ingots. The water balance tower was an elevator, carrying finished iron to the top of the hill to then be loaded on canal barges for transport.
One of the furnaces at the top of the hill. Molten iron would drop down to waiting workers for forming. Are we in hell yet?
The warehouses, used for forming, storing the iron ingots.
Some workers did live at the site, some of the managers and skilled labor snagging decent housing. Score, actual bathrooms.
An ode to the past. A sculpture of pit ponies, depicting the rare days that these beasts of burden were let out of the coal mines for some fresh air and a green pasture.
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