To the Iron Bridge

I've had the pleasure of an afternoon spent with my esteemed colleague Dr C., and a coachload of budding travel writers, all primed with Romantic poems and accounts of Ironbridge Gorge and its associated village, Coalbrookdale.

We visited Rotunda View, Mr. Reynolds' Romantic lookout point on a high hill, though his structure is long since gone, then wended our way through the most beautiful post-industrial landscape you'll ever see: the soft tips of the alder trees give the impression of billows of smoke.

While up there, Dr C. read an extract of a travel letter describing the exact spot, by Richard Warner in 1807. Perhaps there's hope for Detroit yet.

My pictures are here

Anna Seward had this to say (in typical Romantic style) in 'Colebrook Dale' (1810)

Scene of superfluous grace, and wasted bloom,

O, violated Colebrook! in an hour

To beauty unpropitious and to song,

The Genius of they shades, by Plutus brib'd,

Amid thy grassy lanes, they woodwild glens,

Thy knolls and bubbling wells, thy rock, and streams.

Slumbers!--- while tribes fuliginous invade 

The soft, romantic consecrated scenes. 

Warner:

…our wonder was still more excited by Coalbrook Dale itself, a scene in which the beauties of nature and processes of art are blended together in curious combination. The valley which is here hemmed in by high rocky banks, finely wooded, would be exceedingly picturesque, were it not for the huge founderies, which, volcano-like, send up volumes of smoke into the air, discolouring nature, and robbing the trees of their beauty, and the vast heaps of red-hot iron ore and coak, that give the bottom, "ever burning with solid fire", more the appearance of Milton's hell than of his paradise.