Extractive geographies: immersive lives

Abstract

For over 2000 years, miners extracted lead from the moorland of southeastern Peak District. By the early twentieth century the landscape underwent an economic and demographic transformation, as local authorities and heritage groups have ‘naturalised’ the industrial landscape of the southern Peak District, presenting it as a pastoral idyll. These preservation policies occlude the industrial remains by sanitising its diverse past, providing only a partial telling of the landscape. This thesis is about critically assessing these on-going preservation policies, by rethinking the idea of heritage through current cultural geography ideas of landscape, heritage and remembering. Therefore, this thesis argues for an enacted landscape that is perceived and practiced in many ways. This thesis aims to do three things. First, to critically rethink heritage practices of English rural landscapes. Second, to recover the lost ‘minor histories’ of a landscape through a presentation of alternative landscape histories. Third, to contribute to creative methods of landscape research by using an ethnographic approach of oral history, aural recordings, and personal drawing to the study it. The outcome is a constellated and entangled analysis of the rural landscape that recovers the forgotten stories and challenges the authorised heritage discourse of the English rural landscape.