Landscape Legacies of Coal Mining

The Landscape Legacies of Coal project ran from 2017 to 2023.  

The project had two distinctive but interlinked stands, the creation of the ‘coal app’, a series of co-produced and curated heritage walks, and a self-contained but underpinning research project exploring how the public experience, understand and value post-extractive landscapes.

The ‘Coal App’

Catherine Mills (history), together with post and undergraduate students from the University collaborated with local community groups and individuals. Together they produced an expanding series of curated heritage walks that narrated the story of Scottish coal mining through the medium of, and active engagement with, the disappearing landscape legacies, using a mix of historic maps, plans and images and oral testimonies. The walking routes were available as a free to download mobile phone app. 

The aims of the project were to provide a dynamic record of the rapidly disappearing landscape features and industrial archaeology, and to increase local cultural understanding of mining heritage and of the social and economic significance of the coal industry.

The initiative offered a sustainable method of community co-production that provided 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.

The Coal App was generously supported by Macrobert Arts Centre and dedicated to Alastair Ross who passed away suddenly and never saw the project fully accomplished.

When the app became obsolete at the end of 2023 a huge collection of community created landscape routes were in danger of being lost for ever: 25 walks (around 180 miles end to end which is longer than the West Highland Way) with around 1000 points of interest illustrated with historic images, maps, oral testimonies, poetry, song and art and over 200,000 words of text.  

All of this data not only needed a new safe and sustainable home, but one that would also widen the geographical area and include new content. Telling the story of coal into the future through ecology, geology and the black to green energy transitions. Reaching folk not connected to coal through occupation, location and family and also engage a younger age-group.  

With a raft of new project partners and thanks to the National Lottery Players, the Eco-Museum, Scotland’s first industrial Eco-Museum, was launched in April 2024. 

‘Value, Perceptions and Understanding’

This was a self-contained research project that paralleled the ‘Coal App’ initiative and was led jointly by Catherine and Ian McIntosh (sociology).

Academia and policy makers primarily understand post-industrial and extractive landscapes in adverse terms, often within a social and economic policy context. These environments are degraded wastelands representing loss and social dislocation, strongly associated with health inequalities and deprivation particularly within an urban setting.

Less visible are the counter-views that suggest that these spaces offer urban wildscapes where flora and fauna can flourish, they also provide leisure and ‘play’ opportunities that are free of overt regulation and they have an affirmative role both in narrating past industrial glories and shaping communal memory, identity and place.

These studies are generally approached from a ‘top down’ perspective and often skewed by the researcher’s individual view point. Community collaboration on the coal app offered the opportunity for a ‘bottom up’ approach and to explore how the public value these spaces.

Traditional historical research, to create landscape biographies, combined with ethnographical approaches (on site observations, face to face interviews and an online questionnaire) captured public perception, understanding and use of these sites. Analysis of the data suggests a more nuanced and complex mix of negative and positive values determined by individual site histories, notions of identity and personal memories. In terms of use, leisure pursuits were a clear component, together with space for both reflection and appreciation of nature.

The article – “I see the site of the Old Colliery Everyday” Scotland’s Landscape Legacies of Coal was published in Landscapes 21,1 (2021) 50-71.  Thank you to everyone who participated the project, completed the questionnaire or took time out to be interviewed in person.

Get in touch

Visit The Eco-Museum of Scottish Mining Landscapes

Email: mining_landscapes@stir.ac.uk