Kingshill (2018)

Patrick Durkin, was born on a tenant farm in County Mayo. He came to Scotland and became a coal miner at Kingshill No.1 colliery in Allanton near Shotts. He died due to the accumulation of coal dust on his lungs leaving behind a wife and nine surviving children, including my mother.

Thousands of people worked in Kingshill No.1 during its fifty year life span. It was one of the first pits to be nationalised. After it closed in 1968 the land above ground eventually became a small nature reserve. The large 'bing' I used to climb as a small boy was levelled off and trees were planted by the council. The woods, ponds and lichens encouraged the return of mammals, amphibians, insects and birds. The summers are full of colourful flowers and butterflies. You'd never know this was once the site of heavy industry, except sometimes in winter when the vegetation dies back you can see the black slag of waste coal in certain areas breaking through the surface.

I began photographing Kingshill in 2016 using a half frame camera and cheap colour film, imagining myself to be an amateur environmentalist like the butterfly counters I'd sometimes meet whilst out walking there. A collection of these photographs were shown in an exhibition, Coal, Steel and Earth alongside the work of my friend John Farrell at the Scottish Museum of Industrial Life, Summerlee, Coatbridge, in 2018. John had photographed another post-industrial site, Ravenscraig, where coincidentally my other grandfather, Hugh McElhinney, had worked laying rail track. I will keep going back to Kingshill.