An ongoing research project tracing the entanglements of industry, ecology, and myth across the United Kingdom. The term ‘hinterlands’ refers both to geographic peripheries – places historically seen as remote or secondary to urban centres (agricultural, rural areas, docklands, and ports) – and to psychic or cultural margins.
This project has manifested in the extended essay Past Echoes: Women, Horses, and Celtic Folklore in Post-Industrial South Wales (published in Ecoes #6). For more than a century, South Wales was an industrious epicentre, supplying coal that fuelled furnaces across the world. Although the mines closed in 1980s, their imprint endures in both landscape and memory. Semi-feral Welsh Mountain ponies – descendants of pit ponies bred for underground work – roam slopes still punctuated by rusting winches, collapsed shafts, and abandoned chimneys. Their survival is now precarious, yet they play a vital role in sustaining the biodiversity of the uplands. Meanwhile, on Llantrisant Common, horses graze land that has remained communal since before the enclosures, when shared fields were seized by wealthy landowners, impoverishing communities and reshaping rural life. This legacy of dispossession continues to define contemporary struggles over conservation, access, and ownership. The essay also turns to the Mari Lwyd, a midwinter ritual in which a horse’s skull, draped in cloth and ribbons, is carried door to door in a blur of song and procession. Through such traditions, the spectral presence of the past unsettles the present, revealing entanglements of ecology, history, and collective imagination.
Photography: Charlie Pezzack