In the modern age everything is now shipped hither and thither across the world, we get coal from South America, stone from India and oil from anywhere who will sell it to us. But not so far back in time we found our natural materials very locally. Our fuel came from Wales or Yorkshire, the local homes were made from the stones found in the nearby fields and quarries and we didn’t know about the oil.

Nowadays our mines are gone, and there are few quarries left in operation, but the evidence of these acts are still visible. There are the magnificent buildings of London built from the finest Portland stone, the soft warm limestone of Bath and the cold grey granites of Aberdeen, but more than that, there are the scars left behind now. Gashes in the landscape from open cast quarries, heaps left from waste and slag, towns and villages that have only the echoes left from the mine.

And it is across these landscapes that Neild takes us, but more than that, he delves deep below the surface to reveal the minerals that make this country. It is a personal journey too, as he visits the tombs of his ancestors in Wales, and to Dorset to re visit the places he went on holiday as a child. Through these journeys he is reacquainting himself with the link between place and geology, something we have now lost in this modern world.

As Neild is a trained geologist it does make for an interesting book full of fascinating facts and detail. It is personal too, as he takes us back through his family of miners who physically worked the rocks he now understands intimately. The prose does suffer though from being a little textbook like though, probably because he’s an academic; other than that it is worth reading.
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Underlands is one geologist's plea for local, sustainable mining. Raised in the suburbs of Swansea, Wales, Nield's mother's family comes from the mining community of Aberfan and this heritage has played a major role in his life. Whether it was fossil hunting on the Dorset coast or doing schoolwork in the local pits, the places where man once interacted with the earth and its resources were a constant presence. But now that that king of industry has mostly become a part of Britain's past, opportunities to interact with the earth are being lost. Also, globalized minerals are an inherently unsustainable business. For example, most granite, no matter where it is initially mined, is processed in China before being sent on to its final destination. Peak oil would certainly make that kind of thing part of the past. But by far the best part of the book are the author's stories about his family, whether it is his coal-mining great-grandfather, whose tomb in the Aberfan cemetery the author has rebuilt in one chapter, or his grandmother who frequently reminded him on one visit that she and her husband had saved his life by moving to Swansea to raise his mother, because otherwise he would have been one of the dead Aberfan schoolchildren in 1966. Once upon a time most communities had a quarry or brick-works to produce a local supply of building material, but those days are gone. Nield makes a good argument for bringing them back, but whether that will ever actually occur is another matter entirely. ( )