The Plough and the Pick (2024)
The Plough and the Pick, published as a book and available here, is a project about people and place within the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire. It’s about social geographies and the enduring impacts of coal mining, and about agriculture within this peri-urban, post industrial space.
Using verbatim interview text alongside documentary photography, the work explores how the seemingly separate worlds of the plough and the pick are in fact intertwined within families and across this altered landscape, and offers working people’s reflections on past, present and future as pause for thought for all of us in a rapidly changing world.
Selections shared below.
My granddad took on the tenancy. After World War II, when everything was sorted out, you know.
Been sorted out and they had three farms across here and then they got split down between my dad and his two uncles and we ended up in the middle farm.
I sort of knew when I was about six years old and my grandma sat me down and said, you know, we’ve been farming here since generations, you know, and I wasn’t going to have a huge choice in my career, but fortunately I’m happy doing it.
This is all ex open cast land, it’s really wet, heavy clay, but it does grow grass quite well.
Now I would always compare it with the landscape I grew up in. Which was rural, spacious, agricultural. Quaint, almost.
And now it’s gone to... How would I describe it now?
A blot on my landscape, to be fair. What with all the concrete and tarmac, and I never thought I’d see the villages joining up.
The pit heap out that way is Mitchell’s Main, and the one to the left we farm is Darfield Main pit heap, and from Darfield Colliery to the pit heap there used to be an overhead gantry with buckets on it and when it was working the kids used to jump in and ride on it.
Then they got rid of that and used big machinery to transport the spoil across the road.
You know, you’re saying it’s just 40 years ago now, isn’t it, since the strike and all that?
But yeah, it was a good community.
It was rough and it was tough, but it was all right.
We just knew everybody, everybody knew each other, so it was all right like that.
When Meadowhall was built in Sheffield, when they knocked the steelworks down there, we were having a lot of holes on some land we have across the road, and they were bringing lumps of concrete. I mean, it was lorries with big, huge slabs.
Big as two of these tables, lumps of concrete, that they would dig out the soil and stone off the top, go down to the bedrock, and the bedrock would just have split open. And then they would drop these big lumps of concrete on and then put the soil back up the top. That was how they first started repairing them.
Like a hernia repair, I guess.
If they’re out in the middle of the field, I just go and sit with them. Just go for a walk over, and end up in the middle of the field, stood there waiting for them to come back.
Don’t bother me.
He either stops or he keeps going, doesn’t he? If he keeps going, you stand in front of him next time. He doesn’t run you over then.