Exploring the legacies of steel slag at Glengarnock, North Ayrshire: A situated interdisciplinary account of an anthropogenic geomaterial

Abstract

The steelmaking furnace is a place where raw earth materials and human industrial activities meet. Steel slag is an entity that is encouraged to form through the intersection of these influences, as it is employed to withdraw and entrain natural chemical impurities, and hold these contaminants separate from the furnace’s nascent end products. Once it has completed this task, slag is dumped at the outer limits of a works landscape. Here— generally out of sight and out of mind— it enters into new relations with its surroundings. Steel slag does not occur naturally in our environment – its existence depends upon human agency. Yet its material origins and post-depositional afterlives are also shaped by environmental processes. Steel slag can thus be conceived of as an anthropogenic geomaterial, holding multi-temporal stories which can be traced by attending to the entangled worlds it encompasses. The potential of these narratives has however received almost no scholarly attention. This thesis presents an account of the steel slag that forms one of the last remaining physical vestiges of the former Glengarnock Steelworks in North Ayrshire, Scotland. The deposition of this slag into a loch closely neighbouring the works gradually claimed an entirely new anthropogenic landscape from this waterbody, which has in recent years been shaped by a local authority led regeneration project. I develop an interdisciplinary approach— that emerges from the particular juxtaposition of my research context and the three disciplines of geography, archaeology and geology— to explore the past, present and possible futures of this place, positioning its slag as a once largely forgotten, but now newly re-encountered material legacy that simultaneously manifests as a waste product, a post-industrial remnant, and as a novel anthropogenic rock. In so doing, I demonstrate how a personal engagement with this slag’s stories can be used to reanimate taken-for-granted histories, rewrite emerging heritage narratives, and re-imagine carbon futures. In this thesis, I am continuously challenged and surprised by Glengarnock’s steel slag, yet I also come to care about this neglected industrial waste deposit. I find ultimately that electing to pay attention to a local outcropping of an anthropogenic geomaterial reveals choices, and that exploring what can be done with our material legacies, as well as what might be conferred as a result, can contribute to the task of working though the world shaping implications of humanity’s assumption of geological force