That slag heap?

It seems as though at some time God had showered stones and the earth is like slag worthless

As the slag had spread over my valley, so now a blackness spread over the minds of its people.

Ever since I was a kid living in a shack near the slag heaps, my mother has told me about Inisfree and White O' Mornin'.

In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill, not yet enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village,