The Blackdown waste

Between the last ploughed field and the first of the Blackdown workings runs a strip of country that belongs to neither: scrub and spoil, old cleared ground gone back to thorn, broken earth slumped over hollow seams, and the reedy margins of the flashes where the low places have filled with water. None of it existed in its present shape before 4460. The coal made it, out of tipping, sinking ground and holdings given up as the earth beneath them was hollowed out, and it widens a little each year as more arable sags and sours.

It is not wild country, whatever a stranger expects. People live on it, in Tupp's End, the largest of the hamlets at perhaps eighty souls, and in nine or ten smaller clusters of thirty to sixty scattered over the broken ground. Their grandparents and great-grandparents came out of failed farms and shut pits in this same county. They run a handful of beasts, cut turf and scrub to burn, and walk out to the harvest or to surface work at the pit heads. They pay nobody anything and are owed nothing in return, which has suited every party, because the ground has been worth nothing.

What marks the waste out is that nobody governs it. It has no parson, no vestry and no landlord, nor any reeve or other officer; no bounds are walked and no name is set down. A child can come into the world among the tips and be laid in the ground beside them with no entry made anywhere. The Black Lantern house has never come, for it acts at the asking of a parish, and the waste is no parish and has nobody to ask. Whatever the families keep against the dark they keep for themselves, with no one to bless it and no one to forbid it. Mistress Anne Dowsett's mission keeps a room on the Blackdown side, and Joan Kerrow, whom the waste people follow, talks to it; what she has told it has not been written down. In the pit chapels men observe that a thing belonging nowhere would pass unnoticed on ground where nothing belongs, and they do not say it as a joke.

That old arrangement is coming to an end. The Bank Council has begun buying options over ground above the deeper seams, and a great deal of the waste lies over the third. Holding no title, the waste families will not be bought out; they will simply learn, some season soon, that ground nobody wanted now has an owner who wants something of it.