Bog Iron

Hello all, new member here. Not an exact beginner to woodland survival but I would like others thoughts. So at a house I used to live in before we had to demolish it due to age there was a creek that ran below my drive maybe 20 ft from the house. This creek has always been orange like anything that lands in it will start to dye orange after so long. I believe this is bog iron from a spring underground, seeing as the entire area was a coal mine that still has many shafts running under all the hills. In a survival situation I think it would be a good place to settle and try to extract the iron from the surrounding ground. Any thoughts?

 

Small scale iron smelting was commonplace in the UK before the industrial revolution but the the most part it didn't produce a useable end product. It was just a way of reducing the volume of the raw material (from iron ore to bars of pig iron) before transportation. Just being able to do this could provide a valuable resource if you have a knowledgeable blacksmith who is able to work the pig iron into end products.
Making different grades of iron or steel on a small scale require a lot of effort, knowledge and materials (fuel, carbon, chromium, molybdenum etc) doing it all from mine to forge might be too much for one man but as part of a group it could be a long term resource in your area.

 

Thanks for the knowledge Ystranc. Im currently learning smithing with a few friends and here in our hometown we had a massive iron industry. Could go look at many of the forges and furnace's to gain a better understanding of the scale and materials we could need.

 

Actually if things were to go as most projections predict and there is a 90% die off there will be endless quantities of steel pretty much available everywhere. Just imagine the amount of metal you could pull off of one junk car or truck.

Rather than plan on smelting iron ore you might instead prepare for scavenging metals and reforming it into other uses. A working charcoal forge will be priceless as will the saws, files and manual grinding tools to shape the easily available metal that will be everywhere.

Just my humble opinion...