"Once upon a time...there was the Weald. Much of the Weald was smoke and flame - a place of blast furnaces and molten iron - and the mine pits; still, deep, dark cooling pools, from which would come the hiss of steam when white hot iron was plunged in. And scattered throughout the Wealden forest there were those charcoal burners' enclosures - the hut and the kiln, the piles of cut limbs and branches, and the solitary, wrinkled charcoal burner. And...