Oil shale

There was a programme on the telly a couple of weeks ago about oil shale mining in West Lothian. It was good to see the old familiar landmarks - we lived in Bathgate and Mid Calder for over 30 years before moving to Dunbar. Seeing a young woman exploring the Oakbank Mine reminded me of all the times I explored the stoop and room workings in the mine on the opposite bank of the Linhouse Water. I got quite far into the workings, before coming up against water too deep to wade through. The workings are bricked off now, and that's probably a good thing; old mines are dangerous places, even for the experienced. There were three horizontal mine openings - adits - joined by a long gallery parallel to the stream, overlooking the cliff face. And the gallery was pierced by openings, so it was well lit. It wasn't a well-visited place - you had to know it was there, as it was concealed from the Calder Wood Country Park above, and nobody went to the Oakbank Bing on the opposite bank in those days.

I wrote this poem in 1998 about the Five Sisters bing, no far away at Westwood, near West Calder. It was published in Mementoliths (Calder Wood Press 2005), and it contains the geological story as well as the poem. A revised version of the pamphlet, Mementoliths 2, is available from Amazon in a Kindle edition.



Oil shale, Mid Calder

In the woods behind our old home in Mid Calder the Linhouse Water cut through an outcrop of oil shale, a black and fissile deposit of curly carbonaceous claystone, laid down in lagoons. In the 1850’s James ‘Paraffin’ Young discovered you could cook this stuff, yielding a good quality mineral oil for lamps and heating. So naturally, a mining industry started up. In the beginning, the rock was mined where it outcropped, as in the Linhouse Water. Open adits were driven in from the streamside, and the shale was removed by stoop and room working, leaving pillars of rock supporting the roof. It’s quite scary, but I’ve gone in about 500 metres into the workings without coming to the end. A sobering thought, that the big beech trees of Calder Wood Park were somewhere above my head.



Five Sisters

Dry shale’s a slippery medium;
platy flakes of calcined clay
slide over each other
as I launch and leap
down the bing’s steep slope.

Heels dig deep to stabilise
on each long jump,
lunging further
than an Olympian can.

A sense of balance
becomes more important
than a sense of proportion;
fun outweighs gravity
and son-flanked father laughs
as all three skelter to the base.

The long trudge up
to the tip’s top
is an Everest epic
of back-sliding and step-kicking,
and it’s a relief to reach
the five-way summit
for the next downhill slalom.

This stuff was hewn
in oil-shale’s heyday –
retorted and refined
it lit the lamps
and oiled the guns
to blaze at Kaiser Bill
in Scotland’s first oil boom.

The waste, the waste of it all,
a red ton per barrel, tipped and piled;
flat-topped clinker mesas sat and waited
for the road-making boom to come.

Mostly shifted now,
Contentibus bottoms the by-pass,
and Addiewell’s ‘Reserved for Nature’.
But Westwood’s left, the red skirts
of the Five Sisters preserved
as industrial heritage,
now the industry’s gone.

Bing-jumping’s finished too –
my knees wouldn’t take it –
and my boys are men
and moved away.
I wonder if they recall
these pink hills of childhood,
these mountains once mined,
this discarded debris
in a paraffin playground?


Copyright (c) Colin Will 2005, 2016