The Depth of Previous Working Is Unknown - Paperback

by Christine Partridge (Author)

The Depth of Previous Working Is Unknown takes a disused Northumberland coal mine, sunk in 1900 and abandoned by 1926, as the ground for a poetics of trespass and return. Christine Partridge works the double sense of mine as possession and mine as excavation, moving between field notes kept across lunar cycles and seasons, erasures of entries from a 1910 encyclopaedia on badger, buzzard, and fox, and documentary fragments from inspectors' reports, including the death of a twenty-eight-year-old engineman in 1906. The land here is neither pastoral nor ruin but a tangle of tracks, roots, and old workings, where the ruptures of past extraction settle slowly beneath the badger setts.