York Castle Museum

Iron Age Chariots

In the 1800s a mysterious burial site was found in the Yorkshire Wolds, near York, dating back 2,500 years to the early Iron Age. Archaeologists found people buried with their chariots in a custom found only here in Yorkshire and in parts of France and Germany.

Blacksmith Don Barker at work

We have many pieces of rusty iron from these burials in the museum stores and enlisted York blacksmith Don Barker to help us investigate how they would have been made.

To make iron, iron ore and charcoal are mixed together and heated to 800 degrees C. The heat makes waste products pour out, leaving a mass of hot iron behind.

Don made replicas of the chariot fittings and found that a single tyre on a chariot could have weighed 12 kg and would have been made from a bar of iron 10 feet long. It could take more than 100 kg of charcoal to produce this much iron, which would in turn require a huge area of woodland to be felled.

The work on shaping the tyre would have to take place while the iron was still hot, and would have required a team to get the work finished quickly enough.

A whole chariot would have contained 36 kg of iron and the whole operation would have taken a huge amount of resources and energy – an effort not immediately apparent when inspecting a small piece of rusty old metal!