ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the contestation of heritage has been evident on several levels in Wales. It explains the example of Big Pit, South Wales's premier industrial heritage site, to challenge Raphael Samuel's idea of heritage as necessarily about community action. The chapter also argues that attempts to impose an authorized heritage discourses are complicated by the role of the guides who are able to draw on their own experiences as working miners and of the decline of the industry. The coal industry decisively changed the character of the South Wales valleys and the adjoining coastal plain. Although coal mining in Wales dates back to the Roman period, the rapid expansion of industry began only in the late eighteen century. Bethany Coupland argues that the autobiographical memories of the ex-miners emphasized far more the loss of community that accompanied deindustrialization than the "romanticised discourse encountered in the language associated with heritagisation".
