Mining Landscapes

Mining Landscapes is a UK-based initiative dedicated to uncovering and celebrating the rich heritage of former coal mining regions. By developing walking and cycling routes, the organization enables communities to engage with and commemorate their industrial past. These routes are designed in collaboration with local residents, fostering a deep connection to the landscape and its history. 

For building conservation professionals, Mining Landscapes offers valuable insights into the historical significance of mining-related structures and sites. The project emphasizes the preservation of surviving features within mining landscapes, providing detailed information on their historical context and current state. This resource aids professionals in making informed decisions regarding conservation efforts. 

Homeowners residing in former mining areas can benefit from the project's comprehensive documentation of local history. By exploring the walking and cycling routes, residents gain a deeper appreciation of their surroundings and the historical events that shaped them. This connection to the past can enhance community pride and inform property stewardship. 

Enthusiasts of industrial heritage will find Mining Landscapes to be a treasure trove of information and experiences. The project's virtual museum offers a wealth of resources, including historic maps, plans, images, sound and video clips, songs, and poetry, all accessible through an interactive app. This multimedia approach brings history to life, allowing users to immerse themselves in the stories of coal mining communities. 

Mining Landscapes actively encourages public participation. Users are invited to contribute their own stories and memories to existing routes or suggest and create new journeys. This collaborative approach ensures that the project remains dynamic and reflective of the communities it represents, continually enriching the collective understanding of the UK's mining heritage.  

Organisation Statement:

"It is not so long ago that coal had a place in everyday life in Central Scotland. At its peak in the post-war period, the industry employed around 140,000 workers and met roughly 90% of the Nation’s demand for fuel. Woodmuir Colliery, Breich, West Lothian The local landscape of the colliery towns and villages were dominated by the bing, the headstock, colliery buildings, the railway sidings and the associated housing, clubs and bowling greens. Rapid decline from the 1960s brought closure, demolition and subsequent repurposing and/or redevelopment of the colliery sites that erased much of the industrial archaeology of one of Scotland’s foremost industries.

Although often hard to discern, visible traces of coal mining remain in the landscape today, ranging from sunken hollows, patches of colliery waste and piles of building rubble through to communication networks, reclaimed bings and repurposed buildings. Many sites simply remain as semi-derelict landscapes, lingering on the edge of settlements and largely unmanaged, but they are still spaces people engage with daily, where memories of past industry may linger, and powerful legacies can still be imagined and brought to mind such as profound sense of loss and social trauma, particuarly in relation to loss of life or where pit closure was brutal. Yet they also provide a sense of historical and community continuity, an anchor point for identity, and links to the past that helps to understand the present.

Project Aims:

• To provide a sustainable and dynamic record of the disappearing landscape features and industrial archaeology of former colliery sites as seen through the eyes of the local communities.
• To record and interpret local mining landscapes and link former colliery sites more strongly to local memory and knowledge. - To tell the story of deindustrialisation and coal in a much more nuanced and affirmative manner that challenges and reshapes the often-negative perceptions of the ‘pit village’.
• To provide ‘visibility and voice’ by highlighting the cultural, environmental and ecological values of the former mining landscapes and the subsequent role these sites have in green energy transitions and carbon capture.

The initiative offers a sustainable method of community co-production that provides a new medium for individuals and community groups to express issues around their heritage, a novel method of heritage recording and preservation, and the creation of artistic artefacts."