ABSTRACT
Innumerable writers commented on the coal tip as a symbol of the degradation of mining landscapes. In 1995 a regeneration project was launched to finally get rid of Bargoed’s disused pit, and re-landscape the surrounding area, including the tip. The early painters depicted a changing landscape, one where the noise of hammers and engines began to intrude on the agricultural scene and the earth began to be blackened by the early industries. From the eighteenth century, despite the gradual despoliation of the natural landscape and a continued interest in the picturesque, fascinated tourists visited industrial enterprises. A new, brutal industrial landscape emerged, and South Wales became fixed in the popular imagination as a place of dark mines, grime, polluted rivers, and, of course, of slag heaps. Coal tips are particularly potent, and carry such symbolic weight, because they are a kind of degraded mountain, and mountains were central to the romantic imagination.
