The southeastern Peak District lead mining region stretches across central England, representing a cultural and economic network. Over 2000 years, miners extracted lead from the moorland, however, by the twentieth century the landscape could not compete against a much stronger cultural point of view. In the last 100 years, local authorities and heritage groups have ‘naturalised’ the industrial landscape. These preservation policies occlude the industrial remains by sanitising its diverse past. My research is about critically assessing the implications of this partial remembering on the laboured landscape through an oral history of the landscape. I propose that the rural industrial landscape is an assemblage; people enact the landscape through their labour and much more than the dominant pastoral narrative and respective policies. This research looks at how the landscape can be interpreted in an alternative way by exploring it through post-phenomenological theories and methods combining classical Marxist materialist ideas of production with cultural economies and vital materialism to generate a new reading of the historic landscape. The conservation of historic industrial heritage forms a significant part of regional and national identity. If we do not challenge the current processes at work, what sterilised version of our past will we inherit.