received this info off carl who has no knowledge of a moated castle...so was the building pye talks about really hockley abbey built by richard ford and dated 1473 to deceive and make it look like an old castle..pye would certainly have seen it from the bottom end of icknield st...i am also wondering if the burning he talked about could have been the slag or cinders that we know surrounded hockley abbey..
Hello Lyn
As far as I am aware there never was as moated castle in that area. There was a folly owned by Richard Ford made to look like a castle and I have appended below my write up on it.
Best wishes
Carl
Hockley Abbey was a most strange and remarkable structure that drew the attention of Charles Pye one day in the summer of 1818. He was in the midst of making excursions in and around Birmingham to research a guide to the town that he was intending to publish. On this particular occasion he had headed northwest, on what was then the road to Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury via Wednesbury, eight miles distant.
Pye proceeded down Snow Hill and going along what would become Constitution Hill and Great Hampton Street, he was struck first by the ‘extensive view over Barr-beacon, and the adjacent country, including the lofty trees in Aston park; over whose tops, the elegant spire of that church is seen’.
Then, as he began to descend Hockley Hill, his eye was ‘delighted, on the right hand’ with the sight of Hunter's nursery grounds – hence Nursery Road and Hunter’s Road, Lozells. Turning to his left, Pye’s gaze was pulled to Hockley Abbey. It had been erected in about 1779 by Richard Ford upon a piece of waste and boggy land by Hockley Pool, also known as Boulton’s Pool after Matthew Boulton.
Praised as ‘an ingenious mechanic of Birmingham’, it was said that, among other things, Ford had invented a one-wheel carriage constructed entirely of iron. For this inventiveness in the Society of Arts had presented him with their gold medal.
He employed seven workers but ‘several of them expended nine or ten shillings each week at the alehouse. Ford himself was not given to drink and so as an example to them, he put aside between two shillings a week for each of them. When trade was slack instead of laying off his men he used the sum saved to pay them.
One of the tasks they carried out was to help build Hockley Abbey. According to Pye, Ford’s business required him to keep a horse and cart and when his men:
were at leisure, he sent them to Aston furnace to bring away large masses of scoriae, usually termed slag or dross, that lay there in great abundance. Having collected together a large quantity of it, he began to erect this building, to represent ruins; and to add to the deception, there is in the front of the house, in small pebble stones, the date, 1473; and all this was done, as he informed the writer of this article, without advancing any other money than the fourteen shillings per week.
By the time Pye saw Hockley Abbey, Hubert Galton lived there. He was a member of the Quaker gunmaking family that also became involved in banking. As for the house, it was nearly overgrown with ivy, and he noted that if no account had been given of the materials with which it was erected, then ‘posterity might have been at a loss to know what substance the walls were built with’.
Ten years before Pye’s description of Hockley Abbey ‘this curious freak of industry’ inspired a poem by J. Bissett in his ‘Magnificent Guide’ to Birmingham:
Close by yon Lake's pellucid stream, behold
A Gothic Pile, which seems some cent'ries old,
Vulcanic fancy there display'd her taste,
And rear'd the fabric on the barren waste;
The Forge materials for the work provides,
Rude cinders clothe the front—compose the sides.
Where bogs and brakes, and marshy fens were seen,
We now behold a turf-enamel'd green;
It's hoary sage, withdrawn from toil and care,
Both ease and solitude possesses there;
The moss-clad turrets, ivy-clasp'd, o'er-grown,
Look as if peace had mark'd the spot her own.
Hockley Abbey has long since gone, but it is recalled in Abbey Street whilst Ford himself is remembered in Ford Street, Hockley. But it was not the only prominent building that was associated with the slag from Aston Furnace – so too was Aston Hall.
Built for Sir Thomas between 1618 and 1635, the bricks for the shell of the hall were made from local clay and were dressed with soft grey sandstone. The rest of the house was made of timber, for which several hundred oak trees were cut down on the Holte estates; whilst the foundations were made of big bands of iron slag, most of which probably came from the Aston Furnace.
This works for the smelting of iron ore into pig iron had begun operations in about 1615 and it would seem to have been associated with the Cowper family of smiths and scythemakers – who are perhaps brought to mind in Cowper Street just down Newtown Row. Be that as it may, the Aston Furnace was certainly working by 1641 as it is mentioned in the marriage settlement of Sir Thomas Holte and Anne Littleton.
Whatever its origins, the furnace’s bellows for the blast were worked by a wheel powered by water from the Aston Brook (called the Hockley Brook until it entered Aston). This was fetched up an open channel called a leat to a long narrow pool.
By the 1650s the wealthy John Jennens of Erdington Hall owned the Furnace and another at Bromford. He had moved the making of pig iron there from his works in Wednesbury because of the lack of local supplies of wood due to the cutting down of the trees over generations to produce charcoal for the smelting of iron. After the iron ore was dug out at Wednesbury it was carried by packhorse to Aston and Bromford.
In 1653 Jennens left property in Aston consisting of the ironworks, 100 loads of charcoal, and 30 tons of pig iron. After his death, the Aston Furnace continued to play an important role in the making of iron, and with Bromford, turned out 400 tons of pig iron annually. They also produced a huge amount of waste or clinker as it was called in Birmingham.
In the later eighteenth century, in his ‘History of Birmingham’, William Hutton declared that ‘from the melted ore, in this subterranean region of infernal aspect, is produced a calx, or cinder, of which there is an enormous mountain. From an attentive survey, the observer would suppose so prodigious a heap could not accumulate in one hundred generations.’
It was said that one Birmingham jeweller availed themselves of this material. According to Hutton, he ‘cut and polished some cinders from the calx of the Aston furnace, set them in rings and brooches, calling them fragments of Pompey's Pillar, and sold a large number of them before the imposition was detected’.
In 1711 the Aston Furnace were leased from Sir Charles Holte by Riland and Vaughton of Birmingham. Later it was taken on by the important Stour partnership associated with the celebrated Foleys of Stourbridge and then Spooner and Wright. The latter had to use a Newcomen steam engine for power after 1768 because the supply of water from the Aston Brook was inadequate to do so.
This engine steam pumped water back to the headpool for continued re-use by the wheels of the mill. As a new contraption it attracted great crowds ‘who used to stare and wonder at was then known commonly as the fire machine’.
However by the 1790s the Furnace was finally blown out and the clinker that had accumulated was used to make and repair the roads. By the 1830s the buildings were used as a paper mill and in the next decade by a firm of wire drawers. In 1865, that business moved to new premises in Alma Street but took the name ‘Aston Furnace Mills’. The Crocodile Works later occupied that site.
However the name of the Aston Furnace lived on. In 1849 White’s ‘Directory, a street called Aston Furnace Mills was named. This became the strangely-shaped and narrow Furnace Lane, a passageway which ran from half-way up Portchester Street, across Clifford Street and up to Gower Street, Lozells. It survived until it was swept away in the post-war redevelopment of Aston.
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