Burning Mountain
— a coal seam that has been burning for six thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
“A sandstone ridge in New South Wales where a coal seam has been smouldering underground for about six thousand years. The fire creeps south by roughly a metre a year, leaving bleached earth and small chimneys of warm air. The Wanaruah called it Wingen, the fire. Early settlers took it for a volcano. The smoke gives the morning a faint, sweet edge.
Burning Mountain, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Burning Mountain, known locally as Mount Wingen, rises about thirty kilometres north of Scone in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Beneath its sandstone ridge a coal seam has been burning since long before written history; geologists currently estimate the fire at roughly six thousand years old, making it the oldest known coal-seam fire on earth. The reserve sits within Burning Mountain Nature Reserve, managed by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, and is reached by a four-kilometre walking track from the Pacific Highway carpark.
The ground exhales. Where the underground fire is closest to the surface, the soil temperature climbs above three hundred degrees Celsius, and vents push warm sulphurous air into the morning cool. Vegetation pulls back from these patches in a slow ring; the bare earth turns yellow and red where oxidised minerals come through. The Wanaruah people, the traditional custodians, have stories tying the fire to the land long before colonial encounter. Visitors are asked to keep to the track; the crust above the hottest ground is thin and unreliable.
The fire moves south at about a metre a year. It is not a fixed point on the map; the present hotspot sits roughly six kilometres from where the burn began, and the bleached scar behind it traces the path it has already walked. At the current rate it will take many thousands of years more to consume the seam. Researchers from the University of New South Wales and CSIRO monitor surface temperatures and gas vents to chart its slow migration through the sandstone.