The works was probably built in the 1590s for Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester - Queen Elizabeth I's favourite courtier and intermittent suitor - who held lands across the Welsh Marches. When Dudley's lineage came to a complicated legal end, the works reverted to the Crown and was let to Sir Henry Wallop. Wallop did not run it himself. Like most early ironworks, Bringewood was sublet to working ironmasters who knew how to manage charcoal supplies and water-powered hammers. By 1623 it was operated by Francis Walker, and the Walker family ran it for the next seventy years through various branches and partnerships across southern and central Shropshire. The Walkers went bankrupt in 1695. That was the year another family arrived.

Richard Knight, born 1659 and dead 1745, acquired Bringewood around 1695. He turned out to be a remarkably effective ironmaster. He and his sons gradually expanded their operations into the Worcestershire Stour valley, acquiring forges and furnaces and shaping themselves into one of the most important iron-making dynasties of 18th-century England. When Richard retired around 1733 the works passed to his son Ralph, managing in a family partnership with his brother Edward. Edward outlived Ralph and ran the works with his own sons John and James until his death in 1778. The accounts that survive - covering 1733 to 1778 - are among the most detailed records of early industrial iron production anywhere in Britain. They show steady production of blackplate, the tin-coated iron sheet that became tinplate for use in everything from kitchenware to roofing.

Richard Knight had other sons whose descendants would shape English culture in ways that had nothing to do with iron. His son Thomas Knight, born 1697, was the father of two men who became famous in different worlds: Richard Payne Knight, the politician, antiquarian and writer on the Picturesque movement in landscape gardening, and Thomas Andrew Knight, the horticulturist and Fellow of the Royal Society who pioneered the scientific breeding of fruit varieties. John Knight, another of Richard's grandsons, fathered Thomas Knight born 1775 - who published seven papers on mathematics in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, an astonishing output for what would otherwise have been a quiet period. None of these grandsons wanted to make iron. But Richard Payne Knight had a pecuniary interest in the family's ironworks because of how the inheritance had been settled, and his desire to maximise income sometimes pushed decisions that did not best serve the long-term iron business.

Bringewood was a charcoal ironworks at a time when most of the industry was already moving to coke. The wood for charcoal came from the nearby chases - Bringewood, Mocktree, and Darvel - cut on rotation, then converted to charcoal by colliers working in the woods. The iron ore probably came from Titterstone Clee Hill, the distinctive flat-topped Shropshire hill visible for miles in every direction, where iron and coal were both mined for centuries. Finished iron - pig iron, bar iron, blackplate - was carried overland to Bewdley on the Severn, where it was loaded onto barges for distribution. The bar iron made here was said to be tough, which in 18th-century terms meant it forged cleanly and held an edge. Tinplate from Bringewood ended up at a tinmill in Mitton, now part of Stourport-on-Severn.

The works was put back into repair in 1782 under William Downing of Pembridge and a sequence of partners ending with Samuel George. The 1782 lease expired in 1815, just as the iron industry was hit by the post-Napoleonic depression. By then the furnace had probably been cold for over twenty years - Samuel George had built a new coke-fired furnace at Knowbury, closer to the Clee coal, in the 1790s. Bringewood closed quietly. The buildings fell down. The River Teme cleared the site. What survives now is mostly the bridge at Forge Bridge - the place where the road crosses the river - and earthworks visible to anyone who knows where to look. Almost everything else is hidden in woodland, slowly being reclaimed by the trees that once provided the charcoal.