In five years, Scotland plans to run on nothing but renewable energy. Towards that, a start has been to look at deserted coal mines. PHOTO: CoExist

In five years, Scotland plans to run on nothing but renewable energy. The country’s few remaining coal mines are shutting down, leaving a question: How should towns deal with the ugly scars left behind by abandoned mines? Near the village of Sanquhar, the answer is a massive, 55-acre work of land art. Looking like a modern Stonehenge, it builds a miniature multiverse from 2,000 boulders found on the site. Locals, sick of looking at the former mine, lobbied the landowner—Richard Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch—to do something. But they wanted to go beyond just adding a little grass to cover the scarred earth, and build a replacement that might draw visitors to boost a struggling economy. The duke turned to architect Charles Jencks to turn the mine into art.

“Around the world, mines produce an environment which is depressing, and derelict and desolate and deserted, full of junk,” says Jencks. “There have been laws put in place to restore these areas to their pristine original quality—that often means putting grass over the site, plowing it back, and returning it to the cows…we wanted to build something positive for the community instead.”

The design of the site, called the Crawick Multiverse, represents the cosmos, from the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies to a spiral of rocks that make up the multiverse—the infinite realm of potential universes postulated by some physics theorists. Megaliths point to the North Star. Though Jencks has been taking inspiration from astronomy and physics in his work for decades, he says that it was a natural fit for this particular site.

The nearby village of Sanquhar dates back 4,500 years, there is prehistoric stone art nearby, and Celtic gold necklaces designed to represent the moon were found on a farm near by.

More on this experiment in design here.