‘It’s Cast Iron’ he retorted!

For over 30 years I’d been driving along Burnley Road from Rawtenstall but I’d never seen this; not the telegraph pole, the cast iron object to the side, the thing that looks like a WW2 bomb!

Look closely and you can see a small attachment sticking out, towards the top to the right hand side.  Was it a gate post?  These objects have certainly been used for that purpose and can be seen at the entrance to farmers fields across the land.

It’s probably an early gas retort.  Lying on its side with the attachment on top, it would have been filled with coal, sealed and then heated by fire from underneath.  If so, the gas would have passed via a valve (where the attachment is) into a pipe leading to a storage vessel.  To learn more and see a drawing of similar unit from 1815 scroll down to Retort Bench on this page.