Mined

Mined, four poems commissioned for SHIFT Exhibition Catalogue, The Lighthouse, Glasgow, 2007, on theme of the landscape of the Central Belt.

here subside is from words gathered by placing pages from the Clyde Valley Regional Plan, 1946[i] relating to mining subsidence over a map showing areas liable to subside and selecting only those words or part-words that occurred within these areas. The words of the poem have been extracted from the second paragraph and the lines allowed to subside into the spaces left.

 

blaes (scroll down to see full text) The spoil of the oil shale industry is called blaes. For every ten barrels of oil extracted, seven tonnes of waste were produced.[ii] Blue (blae) when first disposed of, it weathers to red. Hardened and sterilised by the heat of the extraction process it forms an excellent substrate for the regeneration of plant and wildlife. The oil shale bings of West Lothian, unique in the UK and Western Europe, are now viewed as sites of great ecological and scientific importance as well as being of historical, educational and recreational value. Having lived within sight of hills all my life, I very much sympathised with the population of the West Lothian town that campaigned against the flattening of a local bing as it was their closest approximate to scenery.

 

Blaes also makes a very good road building material. The M8 and M9 are bottomed with it.

Texts used were The Oil Shale Bings of West Lothian[iii], West Lothian Local Biodiversity Plan: Oil Shale Bings[iv], The Natural Heritage Interest of Bings (waste tips) in

Scotland

[v].

 

 M8 (scroll down for full text) uses material gleaned from what is visible while travelling along the motorway (M8) between Edinburgh and Glasgow.  The words of the poem are all derived from the original (split) paragraph and re-placed in direct relation to their letters’ original position within it.

 But small houses uses the texts Housing in Shale Mining Areas[vi] and a short biography of James ‘Paraffin’ Young[vii] as a reminder of the conditions in which the vast majority of the 19th century mining population lived.  

 


[i]  Abercrombie, Sir P., and Matthew, R. H., The Clyde Valley

Regional Plan, 1946, HMSO, Edinburgh, 1949, pp. 50, 77, 78.

[ii] Harvie, B.A.,West Lothian Local Biodiversity Plan: Oil Shale Bings, West Lothian Council, Linlithgow, 2005, p. 4.

[iii] http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/harvieb/bing.html

[iv] See Harvie, above.

[v] MacKenzie, F., The Natural Heritage Interest of Bings (waste tips) in

Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage,Edinburgh, 1993.