ABSTRACT
South West Wales has undergone significant social, economic and cultural change in the last two hundred years and this is reflected symbolically in its landscape. The sheer number of places of worship attests to the recent rich religious history of this region of Wales, while the progressive decline of institutional religion in the twentieth century is mirrored in the growing number of church and chapel buildings that are now used for secular purposes or lie empty and derelict. These buildings are both symbolic reminders of that rich religious past and material evidence of the cumulative loss of social and cultural significance of religion in contemporary industrial Wales. This chapter seeks to explore, in a modest way, the relationship between identity, memory and place and the ways in which these buildings act as symbolic markers of a spiritual landscape and banal backdrop to a dialectic of remembrance and forgetting.
