Coal seam Residency, pembrokeshire South Wales.

After a few days spent walking, drawing, testing the ground with my feet and scanning the land with my eye I wanted to learn more about this area and join up some of the dots from conversations I have had with my hosts on the farm. They knew of a few old shafts and colliery waste heaps that exist on the farm or because of contact they’ve had with the coal board due to accidents like sink holes and surveys undertaken about the land, but most of this network of mines, their age and even where they surface is largely unknown. The current OS map shows the site of one, at the back of the wood at Harrolds, but mentions nothing of those identified by the coal board and interestingly the board doesn’t recognise the one at Harrolds.
I visited a museum in Narberth, a market town about 5 miles away, that had an extensive collection on local life dating back to the early medieval period, when the land started to become defined by settlements and castles. Something my early research of this place noted was that the majority of the mining companies were English and operated from places in England although its workers and land were Welsh. This area of Pembrokeshire sits on the English side of a centuries old divide known as the ‘Landsker’ line, a political division dating from the Norman occupation of land south of Haverfordwest down to Laugharne in the neighbouring county of Carmarthenshire. This divide is both political and linguistic, defining a separate anglicised culture from the traditional Welsh speaking culture of the north. I am finding this parallel between the invisible divide of political tensions and the physical one of the seam of coal that runs the breadth of this area following almost exactly the positioning of this line remarkable as one echoes the instability of the other. Tension between land, tension between earth, a sense of instability in both the underpinning of this ‘development high risk area’ (a term used by the Coal authority that outlines areas at risk of instability from the legacy of coal mining operations) and the historic development of the instability of land occupation. The English occupation and continued control over autonomy has been contested for centuries, and is still ongoing in both politics and the legacy of the industry created by this land.