Publisher's Synopsis
This book reconstructs the vibrant, rich and diverse social and cultural history of the miners' rows and mining communities in Ayrshire over a century of turmoil and change from the early twentieth century to the present. The authors have used a range of sources, with a focus on non-documentary evidence, notably spoken oral history testimonies, supplemented liberally with visual, photographic evidence. Their starting point was the miners' rows and what it meant to live in these unique village communities, and how this changed over time, with pit closures, depopulation and moving to new council housing in larger urban settlements. Personal accounts have deepened our understanding of what this was all like to live through.
