Sunday, March 02, 2008

Industrial Ruins - and the Labyrinth of Minos

Jo Walton's post "The Industrial Ruins of Elfland" gives a very different view of abandoned industry. Growing up in post-industrial Wales, the abandonded Ironworks and coal mines and the "dramroads" between them seemed to her to be mysterious places abandoned by elves as they moved inexorably west.

My Aunt Jane lives next to an abandoned ironworks. It's notable because we actually knew what it was. We used to play in it, climbing over the walls. It was a great place for hide and seek, and for castles. I knew what castles were. We didn't have one, but Wales is full of them, I'd been to lots of them. I had no idea what an ironworks was -- if pressed, I'd have figured out from etymology it was somewhere one worked iron, but I wasn't ever pressed about it.

A lovely post, elegiac and yet practical and factual too. No photos, just a look into the mind of a child playing inside the uninhabited shells of the past.

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