The geological poem

Some years ago I realised that rocks, minerals and geology had often inspired me to write poems. Hardly surprising, since I had studied geology in the 1970s and worked for fifteen years in the British Geological Survey library. I had the idea of collecting some of these poems into a pamphlet, with notes on the geology preceding each poem. The poems weren't necessarily about geology, but earth sciences formed some kind of trigger for the poems. I self-published the pamphlet in 2005, but it's long since out of print. A revised version is available on Kindle, as Mementoliths 2.

This poem is about the Five Sisters shale bing at Westwood, near West Calder. The distinctive shape of the bing is a feature that's being preserved, as most of the other West Lothian bings have been removed for industrial uses. But it's also about the shale mines within Calder Wood, which were open and explorable when I lived there, although they've since been bricked up.

20. Oil shale, Mid Calder

In the woods behind our 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 © Colin Will 2005

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