Stories in the landscape
The Eco-Museum of Scottish Mining Landscapes has been celebrating the mining heritage of Scotland since April 2024
Bellfield, South Lanarkshire, Scotland. © Mining Landscapes 2024
Mining Landscapes is the UK’s largest eco-museum and the first to focus on industrial heritage in Scotland, spanning the coalfields of the Midland Valley, from Fife to Ayrshire. Eco-museums are virtual collections that focus on local heritage, curated by local communities. They celebrate a sense of place within a specific geographical territory, usually via touring routes, primarily walking and cycling.
Walking and cycling routes are at the core of Mining Landscapes’ collections, alongside an expanding series of destination blog spots, which highlight individual mining features and the associated industrial heritage, landscape journeys, which narrate local stories, maps, oral testimonies, and much more. All resources are accessible online, where routes to different sites can be downloaded and planned. Since the project began in April 2024 until the end of 2024, approximately 43,500 people visited the Mining Landscapes website and used it to explore the Midland Valley.
A local lens
Not long ago, local landscapes of colliery towns and villages were dominated by the coal bing (waste heaps), headstock, engine house, and railway sidings critical to a thriving colliery, as well as the associated housing, clubs, and bowling greens. The rapid decline of the coal mining industry from the 1960s brought closure, demolition, and subsequent redevelopment of colliery sites, erasing much of the archaeology of one of Scotland’s foremost industries. Although often hard to discern, visible traces of coal mining remain in the landscape today – all tell a story.
The collection brings the history and heritage of the mining industry to life through a local lens, offering a sustainable repository for the records and interpretations of post-extractive landscapes, and how these link to the stories of labour and community life in the pit villages.
Engagement and events
To extend the visitor profile beyond those with existing connections to mining through location, family, or occupation, and to engage with a younger audience who typically associate coal with climate change, Mining Landscapes offers new interpretations of the coal story’s legacy. The landscape journeys emphasise the role of former colliery sites in the green energy transition, biodiversity, and carbon capture. Ecological waypoints are also used, which focus on individual plant species, habitats, natural regeneration, and afforestation to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
The museum has hosted five public ‘Coalscapes’ walks and talks that explored landscape, ecology, and geology, and finished with an outdoor art workshop involving cyanotype printing or pebble painting. Using the community-created cyanotype prints, Yvonne Weighand Lyle (project artist) is creating an exhibition piece that brings the geology and ecology of each individual area together in a single creation.
Horsetail plant and fossil, formed 330 million years apart but located at the same spot: Comrie Colliery, Fife. © Mining Landscapes 2024.
Collaboration
The sedimentary rocks that underlie much of Scotland’s coalfield have played an integral role in the industrial development of the country, providing important natural resources such as coal, limestone, sandstone, ironstone, and oil shales. They allow for a unique insight into our planet’s past, when Scotland lay at tropical equatorial latitudes over 300 million years ago. When visiting geological sites, visitors of Mining Landscapes will be signposted on the museum website to images and data on relevant specimens held in the geological collections of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum. Through this, the team hope to link the rocks seen in-person to those held in the Museum and capture new community-focused narratives around these specimens.
To explore the museum and its collection of landscape journeys, blog spots, and stories see www.mining-landscapes.org.
Authors
Dr Catherine Mills
Senior Lecturer at the University of Stirling, Eco-Museum of Scottish Mining Landscapes Project Director
Dr Katie Strang
Curator of Mineralogy and Petrology at the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow
Acknowledgements
The Eco-Museum of Scottish Mining Landscapes is a collaboration between local communities from Fife to Ayrshire, the University of Stirling, National Mining Museum of Scotland, Scottish Geological Trust, Botanical Society of Britian and Ireland, community artist, Yvonne Weighand Lyle, and the Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, and funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund Scotland.
DETAILS
The Eco-Museum of Scottish Mining Landscapes
