Fragmentary landscapes: explorations through the detritus of the Peak District

Abstract

The southern Peak District, like many rural regions of the United Kingdom privileges a particular ‘way of seeing’ the landscape, a Romantic spectacle reinforced in contemporary heritage practices. Yet, the spectacle contains a series of fragments and spaces that resist easy categorisation. This paper proposes a way to account for some of these fragments of the landscape by foregrounding how they constitute a constellation that contribute to its making and unmaking. This is explored in the subversive practices, unwanted fragments and local narratives that showcase an ‘alternative telling’ of the landscape that simultaneously performs a different kind of heritage.

Keywords:

• Heritage
• landscape assemblage
• ruins
• waste
• narratives

Notes

1. These include groups such as the Arkwright Society, the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, the Peak District National Park Authority, the National Trust and Historic England.

2. It has been postulated that one of the main vectors for the demise of the ancient Roman peoples was the extensive use of lead in their everyday lives (Aufderheide et al., 1992).

3. For Gregson et al. (2010) the material of asbestos is a ‘processual’ and relational actant in the deconstruction of ships. She challenges whether asbestos, as a vital material, ‘being alive’, is inherently ‘good’. Lead can similarly be considered as an unruly or ‘negative’ material, and the processes through which it creates harm needs to be taken into effect.

4. Abject matter like dead animals invokes an affect of repulsion, but in this region the sight of dead animals is not unusual. Along with the death of sheep killed by animals, there is the memory of thousands of dead cattle during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the early 2000s (Woods, 2004).

5. The accumulation of various metals including zinc and aluminium becomes absorbed into the soft tissue and bones of many mammals (Rebai & Djebli, 2008). In this case, a vital materialism is damaging for organic life.

6. The death of animals is common throughout the region. Much of the reason for modern animal poisoning is due to the levelling and spreading of ancient mine hillocks. These disturbances expose the lead ore to the surface making it accessible to the animals. This matter out of place (Douglas, 1968) becomes lodged in the bodies of the animals, unable to be excreted or removed. These toxic effects are entangled in a mineralogical-biological assemblage. This locally repressed knowledge is not shared as it would ruin the value and image of the locale.

7. The water from the region falls through the permeable carboniferous limestone rock. Although it is difficult to shape, due to its calcium chemical makeup, slightly acidic water will slowly erode and decompose it. The acidic water also chemically transforms anything that is within the soil, including remnant bits of galena (lead sulphide). Similar to the process of making lead white (the paint pigment), where lead ore would be placed in pots filled with strong vinegar and chemically oxidise leaving a white residue, the lead sulphide would slowly transform into a lead carbonate percolating down into the groundwater. In regions, such as Horsedale, currently a minor water catchment area, the water flows through hundreds of abandoned mine shafts and makeshift buddles or ore cleaning sites. These sites are unknown to many of the people who walk or visit the region.

8. Analysis of historic smelting sites in Derbyshire and elsewhere shows that remnant lead and zinc vertically migrate from the surface into groundwater (Maskall, Whitehead, & Thornton, 1995). Lead can migrate into subsurface regions at a rate of .45–.75 cm/year meaning that a 200-year-old mine tailing could possibly have ore that has migrated more than 1.5 m underground.

9. Krupar (2011, p. 282) discusses how radioactivity in the nature reserve ‘haunts’ the landscape and is only visible via symptoms or measured scientific processes. In the same sense, the lead ‘haunts’ the landscape and is evident in the symptoms accumulated by the people who drink it.

10. This story is from a walk in the woodlands and abandoned quarry site of Hopton Wood within the Middleton Parish. The unplanned ambulation (Bassett, 2004; Smith, 2010) was led by simply trying to reach the top of the moor. In the process, my walk took me through four distinctive areas: an abandoned quarry, a small woodland, a clearing of ferns and remnant lead mining hillocks. Like many quarries in this region, this one most recently shut down in the early 2000s, it formed the original quarry works of Hopton Stone excavations. The remnant site would have been a part of the processing plant for the stone.

11. Each of these sites produce my own trepidation of trespassing as well as an unforgetting of industrial ruins—ancient and modern. A sensory immanence (Edensor, 2005) was generated by becoming entangled in the brambles, cut up by the unstable piles of rocky rubble and an ever present ‘atmosphere’ (Anderson, 2009) of being watched.

12. The collapse of mine shaft caps and the resurfacing of mine shafts is not uncommon. Many stories from newspapers tell of various holes appearing in the ground. A recent opening occurred in December 2013 near the village of Follow, where modern underground workings caused a collapse in the older workings above, causing a pancake effect to the surface, and ‘swallowing a field’ (BBC December 30 2013). The large sinkhole is currently scheduled to be filled in, and will return to being a field. (Matlock Mercury, 14 August 2014).

13. A rake is the term for a vertical vein (perpendicular to the surface) of mineral ore that can run from tens of metres to many kilometres. The term also refers to the collection of surface pits and cuts that are created to reach the rake of lead ore beneath. They follow the vein of ore across the moor. The rake to which Marie refers is the collection of surface cuts that can serve as useful places to dump, throw away any type of rubbish, from everyday materials including paper, cardboard and field clippings to cars, appliances and manure, as well as the odd cow and sheep.

14. The Danteum was an unbuilt monument to Dante’s Divine Comedy by the Italian architect, Giuseppe Terragni, to have been placed in Rome (Schumacher, 2003).