Dark Inner Landscapes: The South Wales Coalfield

Abstract

Abstract This essay documents the underground coal mining scene which is being cancelled out from the landscape record of the United Kingdom. The extirpation of coal mining is addressed from its perspective as a powerful force in landscape transformation, as the expression of a disappearing way of life, and as a reflection of the shift in the British predilection to honor only landscape features of aesthetic appeal. It has long been recognized that landscape writing has generally favored the cult of the village, stately home, and prevailing tastes of period and place as embodied in paintings, novels, and poems of men of letters. Paradoxically, the garden shed which harbors the pick and shovel—the industrial landscape or the “heart of it all”—used to construct this surface grandeur has been discreetly hidden from view. So rapid is the ongoing erasure of the mining scene—the dark, inner landscape of the pit and the more familiar surface features of pithead gear, slag heaps and grey streaked villages—that soon there will be no palpable evidence of how thousands of ordinary people whose lives revolved around this industry worked and lived. Although one cannot perpetuate something that time has foreclosed, it appears that unlike the baronial home, little of the pithead and winding gears, shafts, and underground tunnels of the mining landscape are destined to be preserved for posterity.

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