During the dawn of the industrial revolution the Black Country began to take form. Richard Foley's iron empire had by 1636 grown to include five furnaces, nine forges and slitting mills. In 1665 Andrew Yarranton claimed to have made the River Stour navigable from Stourport to Stourbridge, and in the same year 'Dud' Dudley mentioned his father's Iron works in Pensnett Chase in his treatise 'Metallum Martis'.

Agricultural reform was at the same time amalgamating strips of land into more viable fields and there was a growing movement away from agriculture into industry. The villages of Kingswinford, Wordsley, Bromley and Shut End were well established by the time the first Enclosure Act for their area was passed in 1776. To the west squatter villages, at Cradeley Heath, Brierley Hill and Mushroom Green, were becoming established on outcrops of shallow coal and small forges were set up to work iron.

The Staffordshire and Worcestershire canal opened in 1772 passing to the west of the Black Country, a few miles from the edge of Pensnett Chase. The Stourbridge Canal opened in 1779 and ran to Stourbridge with branches to the Delph, below Brierley Hill, and to the Fens of Pensnett Chase, but it was not until 1840 that the Stourbridge Extension Canal penetrated further into the Chase. The Dudley Canal and the Dudley Tunnel opened up more of the area in the 1790's providing new routes into Birmingham and the rest of the Midlands.

Once the Black Country canal network began to be created it was only natural for industry to wane at Coal-brookdale and take root in the Black Country where mineral resources were more abundant, more easily worked, and a transport infrastructure was beginning to reflect the needs of industry.

The Kingswinford Enclosure Act of 1786 included specific mention of the Lord of the Manor's mineral rights in the area, and of railways. Many tramroads sprang up linking collieries to the canals and to the new iron works being opened, but large areas of the Chase were still unconnected to the outside world.

In 1827 James Foster of' John Bradley & Co', the Iron-masters from Stourbridge, and Lord Dudley, (The Fourth Viscount Dudley & Ward) agreed to build a railway from Ashwood Basin, on the Staffs & Worcs Canal, to Shut End on Pensnett Chase. Unlike the earlier tramroads the line was of standard gauge and much of it steam drawn. A new canal basin was built at Ashwood for the railway, with facilities for outgoing coal.

In 1829 on the 2nd of June the line opened, large crowds saw "AGENORIA"  haul eight carriages with 364 passengers and fourcarriages with three and half tons of coal along the two mile level stretch. On the second run even more coal wagons were added, but on the third run with only a few passengers a speed of eleven miles per hour was obtained. 

The "AGENORIA" was designed by the line's engineer, John Rastrick, and built by 'Rastrick and Foster' in Stourbridge. Their second locomotive, the Stourbridge Lion, became the first locomotive to run on rails in the United States on the 8th of August 1829. The 'Agenoria' remained isolated from the main rail network until 1865 when the Kingswinford Railway and the Pensnett Railway were linked together, and to the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway. Now in York Railway Museum "AGENORIA" is the oldest preserved railway locomotive in the world. 

The "AGENORIA"was named after the goddess of courage and industry.

This body of work is about the landscape through which the Agenoria once ran, a landscape constantly evolving and changing which never the less still bears many scars from its previous uses. It is a history of land usage and the way that reflects on the current topography of the region.