Bing! (West Lothian)

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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Thu May 15, 2008 9:21 pm

Cool. Here are some other map bits, with some of the more conspicuous works:
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Note the 'electric tramway' on this last one:
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The map's from the mid 1920s by the way.
There was a further large oil works not shown here, as it was built just before WWII, just north-west of West Calder at Westwood, next to where the landmark 5 Sisters bing is now.
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby cell » Sat May 17, 2008 4:50 pm

Thanks for posting those maps, they are a great help, I managed to get a look at the two books you referenced I found them on the electronic cataloge but the location was wrong, the staff were great and spent ages looking for them. (If anyone is intrested quote 553-23 INS on the 4th floor) They turned out to be brilliant with tons of good info on shale mining in Scotlands and your second ref was exactly what I was after, I'll post a summary once I've had a good look.
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Flyingscot » Sat May 17, 2008 11:32 pm

The maps of Tarbrax are interesting. I passed through and noticed that the streams are still fairly heavily polluted and there definitely seems to be a lot of work in the area at one time. Is there a landfill out near Woolfords now or in that area?
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Sun May 18, 2008 12:40 am

Flyingscot wrote:The maps of Tarbrax are interesting. I passed through and noticed that the streams are still fairly heavily polluted and there definitely seems to be a lot of work in the area at one time. Is there a landfill out near Woolfords now or in that area?

I really don't know, hopefully somebody else here will (it's a long time since I was in that neck of the woods, back when I was fit enough to cycle from Uphall to Lanark & back for a laugh). Possibly related to the mines? I gather there was a lot of coal mining too, up towards Forth. I do know that shale bings themselves are unlikely to do much, they're apparently relatively benign. I'd imagine the area was a prime candidate for landfill though. No offence to anybody living there ::):
cell wrote:Thanks for posting those maps, they are a great help, I managed to get a look at the two books you referenced I found them on the electronic cataloge but the location was wrong, the staff were great and spent ages looking for them. (If anyone is intrested quote 553-23 INS on the 4th floor) They turned out to be brilliant with tons of good info on shale mining in Scotlands and your second ref was exactly what I was after, I'll post a summary once I've had a good look.

Excellent, I'm glad those books were useful. Please do post what you find! I'm getting kind of drawn into this subject now, I must admit. I think I might have to go see about it at the NLS at some point (the Mitchell's a bit of a trek for me, though they sound like a good bunch).
Incidentally, you were quite right about dumped shale being hot - I found mention of guys handling the waste trucks on the bings having to wrap their hands in rags to avoid getting burned!
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Tue Dec 30, 2008 4:47 am

Telt ye it was big:
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(From a couple of miles south-ish, on the Union Canal.)
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Wed Mar 04, 2009 3:40 pm

I got bored and decided I could do with some exercise, so off I went up the bing again. The weather wasn't as nice as last time, but at least the rain held off (mostly). Inevitably, there are tons of photos once more, though the light was rotten (just to get my excuses out of the way.)

This time, I attacked the beast from the north end.

This sign doesn't seem to have much effect:
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A section of the thing is gradually collapsing:
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Here be joyriders:
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One for the shoe fetishists. It needs a bit of a polish though:
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In case somebody fancies a wee nap:
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Getting higher:
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Higher still, after nearly sliding back down on my face. A smaller bing across the road:
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And here's an armchair being eaten by a Hawthorn. 80 foot up a fecking shale bing. How this got here without being airlifted beats me. Who the hell would go to all that bother? People are weird.
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Wed Mar 04, 2009 4:02 pm

Up top. My legs hurt. A wee bird's-eye view to the north-east. The Niddry bing across the way is slowly being dismantled and taken away by trucks for something or other. Actually, some of this may well end up in the M74 extension:
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Winchburgh, a proper wee shitehole. A lot of the miners who built this thing lived here - you can make out the surviving miners' rows; the closer houses were apparently for works managers and the like (well, the older whiteish ones anyway):
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To judge the scale, there's a pair of horses in the centre of the shot. Towards the top left, the Edinburgh-Glasgow railway:
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Woo, arty shot:
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I'd kind of forgotten how high up you are here:
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The edge of the world:
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Tracks from those dirt bikes that aren't allowed:
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Wed Mar 04, 2009 8:21 pm

Last lap. (Told you there were lots of photos.)

Weird landscape in the foreground, natural landscape behind. Binny Craig's over there somewhere, and the Bathgate Hills form the horizon:
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The remains of the trackbed for the wee shale trucks? I'm guessing so, as it seems to be a solid wooden frame, but I wasn't about to try and excavate it. It would make sense though: I'd have thought the shale is too unstable for them to have plonked down conventional sleepers:
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Just next to it, there's the remains of a, uh, something or other:
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In case you don't know, the railway wagons with the spent shale were hauled up a ramp on the south side (sort of discernible on the photo from a distance I put up before this lot), then across the top of the bing to whichever part was currently being used, to be tipped over the side.

Getting lower down again:
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I can't decide whether this is a piece of rail or a small girder:
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Looking back up. It's steeper than it looks here:
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So, on the off-chance that anybody's wanting to visit the thing, here's how to get there. Get thee to here by car (because public transport would be a horror story unless you're fairly local):
http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&F ... &encType=1
Option 1: park at the wee layby on the corner of the B8020 just to the west of where Faucheldean's marked (Faucheldean isn't there, that's just a wee engineering place.) Then wander east along the road and nip through the gap in the trees, which is where I went this time.
Option 2: I'd say this is the better of the two. Park yer wagon on Greendykes Road, which should be easy enough: that's the Union Canal snaking through the middle of the map, and there's a wee housing scheme along the road to the south of the canal. At the canal bridge, head east along the towpath for about half a mile till you reach this bridge, marked No. 29 on the keystone:
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Clamber ye up the bank and head across, pausing to admire the industrial heritage and that:
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They tried to block this entrance off:
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But somebody had other ideas:
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Nip through. Ignore the bing on your right; that's a smaller, separate one. Head up the wide track until you see a path heading north up into the scrubland by the side of the smaller bing. You'll know it when you see it, cos there's a bloody big shale bing rising behind it. :)
Last edited by Lucky Poet on Wed Mar 04, 2009 9:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby crusty_bint » Wed Mar 04, 2009 8:49 pm

Lucky Poet wrote:I've no idea what this was for:
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This is probably a remnant of the track bed that would have carried the spoil to the top of the bing for tipping, like so
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here i go, it's coming for me through the trees
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Wed Mar 04, 2009 9:18 pm

Ah, a nice find that. Cheers! I'm still confused by the three metal pins there; it looks almost like the bed for some piece of heavy machinery, but I can't imagine they'd need much up there if they were just dumping stuff. (I've a horrible feeling I'll need to visit the library soon - this thread is now the first result Google throws up, disturbingly enough.)
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Re: Greendykes Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby crusty_bint » Wed Mar 04, 2009 10:09 pm

oh yeah, I hadn't actually noticed the pins! I thought this was just track bed from the last phase of the bings life. Maybe it was where the winch for hauling the carts (whats the name of these carts? train geek, help please) was fixed?
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Vinegar Tom » Wed Mar 04, 2009 10:22 pm

Thanks LP - I think I need to visit the Bing :D
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Wed Mar 04, 2009 10:45 pm

My pleasure, VT. It's nice up there in the better weather.

And colour me stoopid, Crusty. Here's me having thought about the trucks (I don't know what they were called either) being hauled up the slope as if they got there by magic. Wi that in mind, I reckon this must have either held a winch as you say, or maybe some pulley type arrangement if the winches were down at ground level. Problem (partly) solved :)
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby TeeHeeHee » Tue Mar 10, 2009 4:31 pm

Lucky poet, re: sliding down the 45 degree slope of a bing on a car bonnet. We slid down our bing on Stonefield Rd
between Blantyre and High Blantyre on a much steeper grade, due to where the shale had been removed for road-fill.
No car bonnet though. We used an upturned Bakers Table which had been freshly scrubbed and left out in the sun to dry. Near the foot of the bing it came to a swift dead stop sending us flying down toward the enraged baker running in our direction.
Natch. we got away. Poor bugger couldn't use his table again. Of course we weren't vandals we were just kids !!

Thanks for the pictures and the memories,My uncle Sammy McNeil lived in Winchburgh, originated from Blantyre, Wife Agnes son Bobby daughter Agnes.
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Re: Bing! (West Lothian)

Postby Lucky Poet » Fri Mar 20, 2009 11:27 pm

In that case, apologies for calling Winchburgh a shitehole. (Though it is.)

Here are some pics pilfered from a pdf proffered by, uh, a pdf provider. They're from an out of copyright book and show the old oil works, mainly Broxburn and some in the delightfully named Pumpherston.

Pretty much everything here's gone now, apart from the canal and the church spire past the more distant chimney:
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Looks like the Union Canal at the bottom left here. I can't decide if this is the Greendykes bing or one of two bings that were placed there previously. (This is according to the NLS's online OS maps. The smaller bing to the south-east of Greendykes is still there; the Albyn bing to the south-west, from which the previous photo must have been taken, is mostly dismantled.)
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Various other shots showing how big an operation it all was:
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