Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th September, 2008

The Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site is a very special place where history and nature have combined over many years to produce a landscape and environment of great beauty.

Nature endowed the area with many of the raw materials of industry - coal, limestone, wood, iron ore, clay and water. Combine with that the genius and entrepreneurial skills of people like Abraham Darby and John Wilkinson and it is no surprise that this once rural area was transformed in the 18th century into "the most important industrial area in the world". The Ironbridge Gorge is now often referred to as the Birthplace of Industry because it was here that in 1709 Darby perfected a technique for manufacturing iron using coke which enabled, for the first time, the mass production of high quality iron.

The iron works of Coalbrookdale and surrounding area gave the world the first iron rails and iron wheels and in 1779, the famous Iron Bridge, the world's first bridge constructed from iron and now an internationally recognised symbol of the Industrial Revolution.