The Royal Forest of Dean can undoubtedly be defined as a ‘place’ as opposed to a ‘space’. It fills a triangle between the rivers Severn and Wye and in years gone by was considered to be a country in its own right between England and Wales – many of the locals would say it still is. The legal boundaries of the Forest have changed over the years but were originally based on the Hundred of St Briavels which dates back to the 12th century and at one time was its administrative centre. The Dean Forest was one of about 20 English forests owned by William the Conqueror and whilst almost everything in the Forest belonged to the King, local people, ‘commoners’, had certain rights and privileges bestowed upon them, such as being allowed to graze their live stock, usually sheep or pigs, and collect turf for fuel and wood for buildings. For many years the (Royal) Forest of Dean was the hunting ground of the kings and as such was kept stocked with deer and wild boar for the royal larder, the latter having controversially been reintroduced in recent years. Forest of Dean oak was considered to be the hardest and best for ship building and provided timber for the English navy. This was apparently of such serious concern to the Spanish that the Armada was reputedly ordered to destroy the Forest oak.
The Forest of Dean is rich in minerals and mining of one sort or another dates back to Roman times. Certainly by the 12th century, ore was being supplied to local iron workers and by the 13th century, coal was being extracted. The industry expanded during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, declining following nationalisation of the coal industry in 1946.
My influences for this assignment came from two main sources. One project of particular interest in part 3 concerned post industrial landscape, prompting me to explore the rich industrial past of the Forest of Dean which is right on my doorstep. Another chapter considered memory and photography and how memory can be selective, fragile and vague. Given that the last commercial iron mine closed in 1946, followed in 1965 with the closure of Northern United Colliery, the last deep coal mine. Anyone with first hard experience of working in those environments will be very elderly by now, more likely though, memories of that era have been passed down through generations of mining families, thus adding to their vagueness. I found the following quote in a book on the Forest of Dean by Humphrey Phelps
‘The close knit communities and the comradeship is what the old miners nostalgically recall. But nostalgia is the remembering of the good and forgetting of the bad like the sun-dial that only counts the sunny hours’ (Phelps, 1982:68)
On the contrary though, the memories, stories and quotes I have found, both in this book and from other sources, are not nostalgic. They recall the danger, toil, hardship and poverty that led to the comradeship that Phelps talks of.
It became very clear as I researched this project that the industrial history of the Forest of Dean was a much bigger topic than I could reasonably cover in this one assignment and I needed a much smaller and more manageable focus. Iron mining, coal mining, free mines, quarries, mills, tram roads and railways , where to start? Eventually, having acquired a series of walking leaflets entitled ‘The Mines Trails’ produced by the Forest of Dean Local History Society in conjunction with the Ramblers Association, I settled on coal mining or at least old collieries. My aim was to source old photographs of the some of the collieries then follow the trails to discover, not necessarily what remained of the old mines but what now stands where they used to be.
Research
Initial research for this assignment can be found here, here and here.
In summary my research methodology was to use a cycle outlined by Matt White at a South West OCA meeting back in January. I adapted this to suit my own style of working and it has provided the structured approach I needed to collect and organised the information that has informed this project.
To be fair, it now looks more like a mind map than Matt’s original research cycle as there have always been several leads to be followed at the one time. My main sources of information have been:
- Forest of Dean Local History Society website, a really rich source of information including maps of locations, walk leaflets
- Forest of Dean and Wye Valley Tourist Information
- Gloucestershire Archives where I found maps and documents
- Dean Heritage Centre. The archive is open on a Wednesday afternoon when volunteer historians are on hand to provide advice and help with research. I was able to find the photographs of old mines here.
- Know Your Place – West of England, a digital mapping project I have used in previous assignments. A ‘slider’ facility allows you to move the map from one period of time to another.
- Hidden Heritage of the Forest of Dean app – links to Google maps, which has been helpful in finding some sites.
- Local Library
Two books in particular have enabled me to gain an insight to what it was like to live and work in the coal mines in the Forest of Dean, both were written by local author, Humphrey Phelps. ‘The Forest of Dean – a personal view’, is part guide-book, part history book but more than anything, it is full of folklore, personal anecdotes and the characters that inhabited the Dean. The other, ‘Forest Voices’ is filled with first hand accounts, stories and memories taken from interviews with local people with personal experience of what it was like to live and work in the Forest during the first half of the 20th century; the men described by Humphrey Phelps as ‘the men with blue scars on hands and faces’. (Phelps, 1982:12) and ‘… men who crawled on hands and knees to drag coal and women who remember them coming home black from the pit because there were no pit head baths’. (Phelps, 1996:6).
I was inspired by the work of Fay Godwin, whose book, The Secret Forest of Dean, I read towards the end of last year. For me, she always seemed to find a unique view of ordinary places and of course, some of the places she has photographed for this book are places I have visited and photographed for my assignment; New Fancy, Lightmoor, Cannop. Having obtained photographs of some of these places in the very early part of the 20th century, it is interesting to see what these places looked like in 1986, when Godwin’s book was published and again today, 33 years later. The other thing I like about Fay Godwin’s books, ‘The Remains of Elmet’ is another example, are the stories and poems that permeate the photographs. In the case of the latter, poet laureate, Ted Hughes was so taken by Godwin’s photographs that he was moved to write poems to accompany them.
I came across the work of Lynda Laird at the Argentea Gallery in Birmingham just before Christmas. She was one of the guest exhibitors in the ‘Out of the Woods of Thought’ exhibition by the ‘Inside the Outside’ collective. Lynda Laird’s project, ‘Dans Le Noir’, explores the landscape along the Normandy coast and in particular the coastal bunkers that formed part of ‘Hitler’s Atlantic wall, and the belief that memory is stored in place. In this series, Lynda has used infrared film which was developed by the military to detect camouflage and other elements invisible to the naked eye and the photographs were printed on silk, referring back the practice of printing escape maps on silk and stitching them inside officer’s uniforms. The photographs were accompanied by a diary entry written by Odette Brefort, a member of the French Resistance who lived through the air attacks along this coast in 1944. This work resonates with me, not just because she has photographed the old bunkers, reclaimed by the landscape as they are now but because of the way she brings together traces of history and memory to explore the perception of place.
In his project ‘Elgin’, Chris Younger explores the site of Elgin School, which he refers to as ‘a forgotten space’ (Younger, 2018) He talks in the introduction to this project about not coming across the site by chance, you have to seek it out and deviate from the beaten track, as I have had to do for some of the old collieries I have visited. There is very little evidence left of the school that once stood there, again, rather like my collieries although unlike most my collieries, nothing has taken its place, even though the surrounding area has been developed. Another of Chris Younger’s projects, ‘A Place called Home’ is interesting too. It is semi autobiographical and explores landscape from both his youth and adulthood alongside a host of emotional feelings in what he calls ‘A past that haunts the land and those who dwell there’ (Elgin, 2018)
My aim for this assignment is to pull together the different strands of research; history, old photographs and memories along with the influences of other artists and my own new photographs to give a sense of the places the Forest of Dean collieries have become today.
Sources:
Phelps, H. (1982) The Forest of Dean. Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd.
The Royal Forest of Dean – Official site for the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley (s.d.) At: http://www.wyedeantourism.co.uk/rfod [Accessed on 3 March 2019]
Godwin, F. (1986) The Secret Forest of Dean. Bristol: Redcliffe press and Arnolfini Gallery in collaboration with the forestry Commission.
Godwin, F. (1979) The Remains of Elmet. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Dans le Noir (s.d.) At: https://www.lyndalaird.com/dans-le-noir [Accessed on 3 March 2019]
ELGIN (s.d.) At: http://chrisyounger.uk/elgin [Accessed on 4 March 2019]
A PLACE CALLED HOME (s.d.) At: http://chrisyounger.uk/a-place-called-home [Accessed on 5 March 2019]
Anne's Landscape Learning Log 