About
Irish Bloomery Iron Limited is a company dedicated to making and forging iron in the traditional Iron Age method.
Iron created in this way is completely unique in the modern day and has a beautiful and subtle pattern. We are dedicated to keeping this dying craft alive and working with the tools and materials that our ancestors did.
The Iron:
Bloom Iron simply means iron that has been made in a Bloomery furnace and is most similar to wrought iron, having a fibrous and heterogenous composition, entirely unlike modern steels. Because of this, the iron has a beautiful natural pattern when etched, even without any pattern welding, although this can, of course, also be done. Due to the natural slag inclusions and soft, ductile nature, bloom iron fire welds especially well and requires little or no flux when done correctly. We highly recommend anyone considering working with Bloom to first practice forging and fire welding in wrought iron and not jumping straight into the deep end like we did, the learning curve is steep (and expensive!).
How it's made:
To smelt the iron, first we must build a furnace from clay, sand and natural fibre, then slowly dry the clay to prevent egregious cracking. Only when the furnace is fully dry can we begin the smelt.
We supply air by hand with leather bellows, adding layers of charcoal and bog ore in layers over the course of several hours until an iron bloom forms at the heart of the furnace.
We then extract the iron bloom and work it with great care on a wooden stump and then an anvil over a period of many hours, stretching and folding, each time refining the structure of the iron and making it more homogenous, turning the raw iron bloom into a useable bar which can then be forged into iron objects.
About us:
We are 2 young smiths working to keep traditional crafts alive in Ireland. We met at the Woodford Furnace Festival in 2019, where we were both taught by master smelter Lee Sauder, and have been close friends ever since. We now organise and run the successor to the Woodford festival in Caherconnell, Co. Clare, where we teach courses and demonstrate iron smelting to the general public.
The Caherconnell Furnace Festival:
The festival runs at the end of August each year, here iron smelters from all over the world share their skills and knowledge with each-other and put on pre-historic pyrotechnic show for the general public. We also run courses where you can come and learn to smelt iron yourself! Students work together to build a furnace, smelt iron and forge their iron into a meaningful piece they can bring home.