The geological poem

I'm calling it that, but in reality I've written quite a few poems which feature geology and the other earth sciences. I did Open University courses in Geology, Geochemistry and Geophysics back in the day, and I worked as Librarian in the British Geological Survey for fifteen years.

This one's also a local poem, set in the Bathgate Hills. I moved to Bathgate as a teenager in 1957 or 8. Much later Jane and I first set up home together in Bathgate, and our two sons were born there, so I know the Hills very well. Geologically, much of it's a volcanic atoll with a fringing coral reef, Carboniferous in age. There are a fair number of volcanic dykes, and a couple of them are associated with lead ore deposits. Near Knock Hill, the Silver mines were discovered in 1605 by a Linlithgow collier named Sandy Maund, and mined out by 1613. It's a high-temperature orefield, with silver, lead, zinc, barytes, nickel and arsenic minerals found in a feeder dyke - possibly an old 'black smoker' hydrothermal deposit. I explored the mine in my younger days, and researched the history too, finding shafts called God's Blessing and The White Hole. So that's where this poem comes from. It was published in my first collection - Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996).

Mining silver


“God's Blessing” ran out too soon.

Where the Silver Bourn flows below Cairnpapple’s kist,
Sandy Maund’s ‘wondrous ore’ shone like metal hair,
till Saxon miners clipped it all away
in seven short years.

At Windywa’s the minister’s flock diminished
and he migrated, his line returning as Lord Beaverbrook.
Inside Aitken’s mine the timbers can be squeezed like sponge;
a fat toad squats in an alcove, in the dark,
and round the entrance there are burning nettles.
On the spoil heaps dead hens advertised
nickel, arsenic, and cobalt too - the Devil’s metal -
for blessings are seldom wholly Divine.

The dark and stinking muds in tropical lagoons
at Pumpherston, Uphall, Winchburgh,
transformed to coked and calcined oil-shales; voids
to swallow schools (the price of cheap land),
and hideaway shooting galleries
for the Linhouse Water sniffers.

At Knock you’re on a wrecked reef,
a fossil black smoker, plundered for profit, like the rest.
From the atoll’s stump view
Ochil and Pentland scarps, below, between,
remember coal swamps as you breathe
Polkemmet’s brimstone.

West Lothian’s an extractor’s Paradise;
new holes are easily punched in the Central Belt,
and the folk are so well used to their waste lines that
the Westwood bing’s preserved, for Heaven’s sake.

By the ‘Blessing’ shaft yellow iris flags waggle
in the summer breeze, and there’s always
a lark nearby, with his silver flute.
The grasses ripple by like waves of hair,
or fronds in a coral sea.


Copyright © Colin Will 1996, 2015