Mine Lands: A Guided Walk to the Glendalough Mines

Dr Sharron Schwartz and Dr Martin Critchley lead a guided history and geology walk at 12pm, Sunday 6th April 2025, to the Glendalough Mines in County Wicklow. This is in support of the brilliant Dublin-based artist, Judy Carroll Deeley, who draws inspiration for her paintings from the rich relict mining landscapes of the Glendalough and Glendasan valleys, which is the subject of her current exhibition at Mermaid entitled, Mine Lands: Glendalough & Glendasan. 

© Dr Sharron P. Schwartz

Decoding the landscape and discussing the history of lead and silver mining at this heritage site, Schwartz and Critchley offer a lesser-known industrial past of this terrain, where long-forgotten machinery now blends into the environment. These histories inform Carroll Deeley’s explorations of locations usually associated with monastic antiquity, which have been subjected to human intervention for centuries.

The 5.4km walk to the Glendalough Dressing Floors (Miner’s Village) took around 2.2.5 hours and was free of charge. The meeting point was the Glendalough Upper Lake Car Park. 

Landings: Art after Extractivism

Judy Carroll Deeley collaborated with UCD Humanities Institute on their international study, ‘Post-Extractivist Legacies and Landscapes’ as the main project artist. Sharron and Martin gave a guided walk to the mines as part of the ‘in-field experience’ for the conference delegates.

Her new series of paintings, Capitalocene: From A Time Of Ambition, imagines what happens when human commercial activity has reached its zenith and may now be ‘on the turn’.

​Some of Judy’s work forms part of a new exhibition: Landings: Art after Extractivism 

​You can find out more about the project at the web addresses below:​https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/research/extractivistlandscapeshumanitiesartisticandactivistresponses/

Mine Lands: A Guided Walk to the  Glendalough Mines