Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 13.2.
Black Country landscape in the 1960s. Mine spoil heaps and pit pools such
as these were common in the seventeenth century and stocked with coarse fish to
provide food. The large block in the background is the remains of a slag-heap from a
blast-furnace demolished in the 1940s. Today the area is all housing. (
T. E. L. Langford.)
#
with 33% 'man-made impenetrable area' which affected both runoff rates and
surface water quality. In the 1991 census there were 1.7 million people in the
Tame catchment of which 80% lived in the Black Country and Birmingham
conurbations (NRA
1996
).
The relatively few watermills which did exist in the upper Tame area were
used for various processes from at least the eleventh century until the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, and included fulling mills, tanneries,
paper-mills and forge-hammer mills, mills for powering bellows for blast-
furnaces, blade mills and slitting mills for cutting iron into bars or strips
(Dilworth
1976
). Small-scale metal industries were common by the Middle
Ages (Pelham
1950
), and by 1540 there were many smithies, lorimers and
nailmakers in both Birmingham and the Black Country. Although all the
industries were on a relatively small-scale individually, noxious effluents were
associated with tanneries, fulling mills, abbatoirs and metal working causing
localised river pollution (Raistrick
1973
; Wohl
1983
; Haslam
1991
). The dis-
turbed and industrialised state of the land by the mid seventeenth century
is illustrated by the plethora of mine pools and flooded clay pits in the
Black Country which contained mixed fish populations, often introduced by
residents to augment their diet (Plot
1686
)(
Fig. 13.2
).
