A little further on from the level crossing gates mentioned in Secret Ironbridge: Open Wide, and the Great Western Railway track-laying engineers must have thought that Christmas had come early when they came upon Chapel Lane at right-angles to the railways path.
All they needed to do was build some brick parapets and then drop a ready-made bridge on top, which was in contrast to most of the bridges in the Ironbridge Gorge that needed to be skew-bridges with complex brick-built abutments.
The ready-made bridge they chose was a Brymbo bridge, manufactured in the Denbighshire village of the same name. The Brymbo steel works operated from 1796 to 1991, and there are links with the Ironbridge Gorge because, in 1842, William Henry Darby and Charles Edward Darby (grandsons of Abraham Darby III who built the famous Iron Bridge here in the Ironbridge Gorge) were brought in to manage the works, and so would have been in charge when the little railway bridge was made.
Some years ago major repairs were carried out, and little, if any, of the original Brymbo construction remains. It is now much narrower that the original and has a slight arch to it.
After passing under the bridge, you come across the Coalford Wesleyan chapel, built in 1825, that gave the lane its name (Coalford is an area within the village of Jackfield). John Wesley (1703-1791) was an English cleric and evangelist who led a Methodist religious movement within the Church of England that had its own places of worship in most towns and villages.
In 1884, the Wesleyan Methodists split away from the Church of England to form a new Christian denomination, and later, in 1932, there was a unification with the Primitive Methodists and the United Methodists to create what is now known as The Methodist Church.
The Coalford chapel closed in 1980 and is now used by a local brass band as their practice room.
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