Exploring energy landscapes
In Scotland and most especially Central Scotland communities and industry exploited the land assets of carboniferous coal as well as ironstone, oil-shale, sandstone, limestone, fireclay and mudstone. The University of the West of Scotland’s Ayr campus rests on the banks of the River Ayr that flows to the sea to the west. This river has its source high in the moorland and hills to the east of the Ayrshire coast in an area rich with a cultural and economic heritage of mining.
Ayrshire is a landscape of now “post-industrial” mining. Students and staff from the MA Creative Media Practice programme took time to explore the landscape of Glenbuck, high in the hills of East Ayrshire, and near the source of the River Ayr at the Glenbuck Loch. Glenbuck, in the parish of Muirkirk had historically been a site of iron ore mining and then modern industrial coal extraction but throughout the twentieth century the mining economy struggled leading to the eventual depopulation of Glenbuck village and its final abandonment was realised in 1954. This ‘lost village’ with many of Glenbuck’s residents relocated to nearby Muirkirk was then eventually erased from the landscape following a decision to rework the area as an opencast mine in the 1990s, now too disused. To learn more about Glenbuck’s history and life in the mining communities of Ayrshire see this University of Strathclyde project from Professor Arthur McIvor and Dr. Yvonne McFadden, The Lost Villages: An Oral History of Miners’ Rows and Deindustrialisation in East Ayrshire, Scotland. Today the area has been reworked again as a site of Scotland’s current and future energy industry landscape of windpower generation and heritage access.
The area near the site of the former mining village, Glenbuck (Scots Gaelic: Gleann Buic) in East Ayrshire. The last mine closed in 1931. Open cast mining (Spireslack Opencast Surface Mine) took place later in the 1990s but has long since ceased. Today the site is now partly used for wind energy power generation, with wind turbines located on the hillsides.
The site has a layered story of ecology, economic and social activity.
The site assets include what remains of the open cast mining and the exposure of the local geology had been identified as unique ‘learning asset’ research site. You can read about this proposal in more detail here at The Geological Society – “Graham Leslie and Mike Browne explore the opportunities that can be built on the legacy of Scotland’s Opencast coal” and their proposal for a Scottish Carboniferous Research Park.
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