Coal played a key role in the Scottish Industrial Revolution, and has employed hundreds of thousands of people. Competition from abroad and new, cheaper energy sources led to spiralling closures at the end of the 20th century, with Scottish Coal, operator of the last six open cast mines in Scotland, entering liquidation in 2013. What remains are challenging ‘carboniferous legacy’ landscapes that are framed, in the midst of a ‘greening’ Scottish economy, as abandoned, toxic and exhausted, and responsibility for which cuts across sectors.
This PhD project emerges from a collective interest in the future of Spireslack from across the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences. Funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, and co-supervised by myself and Richard Williams (Fluvial Geomorphology, University of Glasgow), it draws together human geography, biogeography, and the participation of the Scottish Mines Restoration Trust (SMRT) to interrogate the planned, and possible, futures of Scottish coalfields. Using a combination of social science methods and environmental Earth science methods the project asks:
- What are the environmental and social legacies of former coalfield ‘legacy sites’?
- How can debates in the heritage sector on ruins as public spaces offer insight into the current community engagement practices of the Scottish Opencast Coal Taskforce and the SMRT, and how might these practices be usefully augmented?
- How can coalfields be used to evidence and narrate the Anthropocene as a planetary condition, and as an opportunity for renewed understandings of how to live with, as well as on, the Earth?
Using the former opencast coalmine of Spireslack in East Ayrshire as a central site for research, the project sets out to identify the connections between the environmental composition and condition of a site, how it is perceived and managed, and how it might be used anew. Spireslack was mined from the late 18th century to 2008 by workers from nearby villages such as Glenbuck. Following the decline of the coal industry in the UK, and the liquidation of Scottish Mines in 2013, the SMRT has worked to remediate the landscape and to give it new purpose. Building on the lessons learned from Spireslack, the project asks how can, and how should, we engage with the challenging landscapes that coalmining has created – landscapes that have been excavated, drained, filled in and often polluted? What futures are possible for these sites? And what futures do we want for them?
Sustainable Extractive Landscape Futures 