Ruth Oldham: Holes and heaps, terrils as cultural artefacts

Mining and quarrying, whether for coal or copper, marble or potash, are activities that necessarily alter the land. A hole is made; a heap of waste is created. The hole might be hidden underground, its presence only felt on the surface through areas of subsidence. In the case of quarrying and open cast or strip mining the hole is at ground level, perhaps shallow and wide, or deep and steeply sloped. The heaps of waste material can be amalgamated into a giant mountain, or dotted around as a series of smaller mounds, or spread as low and flat as possible. The original topography is modified; the original vegetation is lost.

What should happen to the holes and the heaps once the exploitation has finished? For centuries, across the world, they were just left in place, at most fenced off to prevent accidents. But over the past few decades scientific understanding and public awareness of the problems that mining and quarrying leave in their wake has increased. In the face of these problems – erosion, landslides, water pollution, disruption of water tables and local hydrology systems, loss of biodiversity, as well as the aesthetic impact of barren and carved up land, legislation has been passed forcing landowners and mining companies to reclaim the land and make it hospitable. This seems an entirely justified response, and it is vital that companies be held to account for the impact of their activities; that they are not allowed to simply exploit the land and move on to the next site.  

But the debate is complex, and here I will borrow a phrase used in the original call for articles for this issue, as this greening over can also serve as a ‘a screen or a mask that beautifies a set of ugly exploitations… that excuses industrialised extractive industries.’ I would suggest that it can create a sort of amnesia, helping the public forget, or preventing us from ever realising, the extent of our actions, just how much we intervene in the earth in order to create and maintain our way of life.

This debate goes back at least to the 1970’s, the period when public awareness of environmental issues exploded. Robert Morris’ essay, ‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation’ (1), outlines some of the principal debates surrounding the reclamation of mining landscapes. Observing how difficult it proved to establish and agree upon a workable definition of reclamation, he notes that in the USA the 1977 Surface Mining and Control Reclamation Act ultimately transferred the responsibility of reclamation upon individual state governments, who define and enforce it with wildly varying methods and means. Whilst this lack of definition opens up possibilities for the mining companies to carry out the minimum of reclamation, it also recognises that each site is unique (whether in scale, the nature of the disruption, or the surrounding environmental context) and that reclamation after exploitation should take into account these differences – there cannot be a universally adapted solution. Morris suggests that mines present enormous scope for artists to create site specific works. Such works might run the risk of serving as public relations exercises for the mining companies, but they also have the potential to engage public attention to the subject of environmental exploitation by doing something other than simply evening out and greening over the landscape.

Morris makes reference to Robert Smithson, whose writing and art work of the early 1970s addressed these issues directly. ‘It seems that the reclamation laws really don’t deal with specific sites, they deal with a general dream or an ideal world long gone… we have to accept the entropic condition and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly. There’s a conflict of interests. On the one side you have the idealistic ecologist and on the other side you have the profit desiring miner and you get all kinds of strange twists of landscape consciousness from such people.’ He believed that the artist had a vital role to play in negotiating this conflict. ‘Such devastated places as strip mines could be recycled in terms of earth art… Art can become a physical resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist.’ (2)

In 1973 Smithson sent the Kennecott Mining Company an unsolicited proposal for a reclamation artwork at the world’s largest open cast copper mine, Bingham Canyon in Utah. His proposal capitalised upon the monumental nature of the site, leaving the vast spiralling ramps untouched, and simply creating a pool of bright yellow (due to the acidity of the site) water in the bottom, with four jetties that would submerge and appear in response to rain and water levels (fig 1). The company never responded to his proposition, as the mine was active at the time and remains so today. But it is interesting to note that the site has since become an important tourist attraction; the visitor centre inaugurated in 1992 has hosted over three million tourists and the sheer monumentality of the mine is an attraction in and of itself. Robert Morris suggested that it ‘should stand unregenerate as a powerful monument to a one-day nonexistent resource’ and he goes on to note that ‘all great monuments celebrate the leading faith of the age – or in retrospect, the prevailing idiocy.’ (3) It is not surprising that the land artists were attracted to mining sites, as the scale of the industrial interventions in the land tended to exceed anything they could hope to achieve on limited arts funding budgets. An abandoned mine could be considered to be a ready-made art work – the artist’s job was to rethink it from mine to artwork, and find a means to communicate this transformation.  

Robert Smithson; notations.aboutdrawing.org/robert-smithson
Keeping in mind the issues raised by the 1970s land art movement, I would like to look at the landscape of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais area of northern France, which has been deep mined for coal for nearly three hundred centuries. The disruption to the surface of the land has been minimal compared to an open pit mine such as Bingham Canyon, where the mine has displaced all other land use, even engulfing the original town of Bingham. In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais some of the now abandoned underground mines have manifested themselves at ground level in the form of subsidence lakes, but the most obvious impact to the topography has been the creation of hundreds of spoil heaps, known as terrils in French, from terre (earth). There are over 300 of these small hills of dark grey rocky waste dotted across a strip of land about 12 miles wide that stretches 120 miles east to west. Their conical silhouettes have created a strong visual identity to this otherwise flat and uneventful part of northern France (fig.2). Alongside the terrils, the area became urbanised. The mines supported a workforce of thousands and attracted immigrants from all over France and Europe. These new arrivals were housed in exemplary workers’ housing estates with schools, churches and other community facilities, all provided by the mining companies. A network of railway lines was created to transport the coal.

The last mine closed in 1990, concluding a slow decline that began in the 1960s. In 2012 the entire area was classed as a UNESCO world heritage site, considered to be a complete landscape bearing witness to the coal mining industry which in turn was a crucial element of the European Industrial Revolution. In all 353 elements (such as pit head machinery, housing estates, schools, railways and terrils) have been listed. They recount many aspects of the rich social and economic history of the area, from the paternalistic management techniques of the mining companies to the workers’ unionisation movement and the struggle for improved conditions and rights. Interestingly, in the inventory of the UNESCO listing, the terrils (of which 51 are listed) come third, ahead of the housing and the social amenities. The inadvertent results that the mining had on the landscape have been recognised as important as the infrastructure that was created to enable it.

But I think there is something more going on. The terrils are loved by the people who live near them: they climb them, fly kites on them, appreciate the wildflowers and butterflies, and enjoy having a high place from which to get a view. And they are also recognised by the thousands of people who pass through the area every day, often at high speed on the motorway or train. I always find myself scanning the horizon looking out for the first glimpse of a terril. A pair of particularly large twin terrils on the edge of the town of Lens were humorously likened to the Egyptian pyramids and featured in the successful campaign to bring the new outpost of the Louvre to the town. The upheaval (mess?) left behind after over three hundred years of mining has become the defining feature of the landscape – it is the landscape.

Mines et cités minières du Nord et du Pas-De-Calais Photographies aériennes de 1920 à nos jours. Olivier Kourchid, Annie Kuhnmunch. Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990At the beginning of this text I asked what should be done with all the holes and heaps left behind once mining and quarrying industries have exhausted their resource. It is an overly simplistic question, as a short exploration of the subject leads one to realise that each site is unique and has to be approached individually, but it is nonetheless the question that has led to the creation of numerous laws and regulations in countries across the world. Were a new seam of coal discovered in France today it would be inconceivable that its exploitation result in the creation of several hundred spoil heaps dotted across the landscape.  

The landscape of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais is interesting because there has been no program to return it to some previous (and now forgotten) state. A natural process of greening over has gradually got underway (some of the terrils are entirely wooded, others remain barren and stony, some have a green fuzz of pioneer vegetation). Overall, in its altered, man-made state the landscape has been left intact and only a couple of decades after the end of the mining it has become highly valued and cherished. The UNESCO listing came about after a nine year campaign, led by local politicians and heritage professionals, and notably underpinned by real support from the local communities. The terrils and the other remains of the mining infrastructure have been incorporated into the identity and daily lives of the local population. In a similar way to the land artists transforming (rethinking) abandoned mines into site specific artworks, here the remains of the mining industry and in particular the heaps of waste that it left behind, have also been rethought - as places of recreation, and as cultural artefacts that tell us an important history.

photo: author’s own
Morris, Robert, ‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation’, October, Spring 1980
Flam, Jack (ed), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press 1996
Morris, 1980

Ruth Oldham studied architecture in Glasgow and London and now lives in Paris. She is interested in landscapes, waste, and the imagination – subjects she is exploring in an ongoing study of man-made mountains.