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A gallery of artefacts that have been found on both the original Keer Marsh and later Warton Sands slag banks.
This shorter section was found near the race track.
Lengths of bullhead rail are commonplace around both sites. Above is the longest yet, and was found close to the mouth of the Keer.
The section is 5" high, equivalent to a 90lb per yard weight, a common section for the standard gauge lines around the works and to the slag bank.
Round slag blocks are widespread over the entire site. Closer scrutiny will reveal significant differences between them. Given the timespan over which they were dumped and the rapid pace of change to process and equipment, one should expect to see variations in shape, size, and composition. Surprisingly, those blocks already engulfed by the sea exhibit smooth exteriors and those two on the left have an unusual pattern of parallel grooves (on the base). They measure about 4ft. in diameter.
Part Chair
Full Chair.
Chairs secure the rail to the sleeper. These are quite common. They sustained breakages from time to time and likely as not the platelayers would toss the damaged chairs in with any slag bogie destined for the tip. These are a two hole pattern. There are the more common four hole pattern chairs marked BR nearer the existing main line railway but there was an earlier type marked Furness Railway from about 1889.
Pulled out from the slag in July 2024, and partially exposed on the shoreline amongst several other rusty iron artefacts that could not be identified. The leather nailed sole of someone's boot. Hopefully it was discarded. I'm not going back to dig the area!
A couple of bricks fused to a flat section of slag material. GLENBOIG was a successful manufacturer of refractory brickwork in Lanarkshire exporting to global customers. They specialised in products for the Iron and Steel industry. There is a considerable amount of scrap steel that is hard to identify although far right appears to be a broken fishplate for joining together rail sections. More information about refractory finds on the separate refractory page.
These unusual round iron discs, distributed along the slag banks were a mystery when first noticed in about 2024. This illustrates how large they are. 2 years later and I have an explanation.
These two finds in 2026 were key to understanding the origin of the iron discs. Left, there is a partially exposed slag block with an iron disc bonded to the top. Right, a disc with some small remnants of slag bonded to the surface. So it is likely that when they were dumped on the bank, some of the slag blocks were "contaminated" with pig iron from the furnace. Over time, the slag, more susceptible to coastal erosion has been removed, leaving the iron as a disc, typically 54" in diameter.
In the blast furnace, as the iron ore was reduced to iron it gathered in the hearth (at the base of the furnace) and was tapped say every 6 hours. Slag, accumulating at a higher rate and being less dense, floated on top of the molten iron and was tapped on a higher frequency and through the slag notch sited higher up in the furnace. It's easy to imagine that from time to time, some quantity of molten iron could exit through the slag notch when tapping the slag.
There would be little practically possible to stop this and it wouldn't be worth trying to separate the iron from the slag, so it was simply dumped on the bank. After 100 years of erosion, the slag has mostly gone, leaving an iron disc behind.
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