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 Waste to Monument: John Latham’s Niddrie Woman Art & EnvironmentCraig Richardson

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 Waste to Monument: John Latham’s Niddrie Woman Art & EnvironmentCraig Richardson

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Resembling extinct volcanoes that rise to a height of ninety-five metres in places, these irregular and often top-sliced cones of burnt and oxidised waste are the residual product of a mid-nineteenth-century mining process designed to extract and distil products from oil-bearing shale for use as paraffin fuel. Mining of this kind continued in Scotland on a phenomenal scale and offered significant employment until midway into the twentieth century, by which point cheaper oil from the Middle East was lubricating western economies. Two barrels of crude oil extracted from Lothian's ground by a unique heating process known as 'retorting' produced over one ton of burnt shale waste. By the mid-1860s over half a million barrels of crude shale oil were produced annually and production continued at this rate until the mines began to close between the 1920s and the early 1960s. 1

Viewed from a single spot, bings might be said to have a steep front or face and a characteristically long tail, which allowed vehicles to ascend to the top to deposit burnt shale. In comparison to the notionally dormant local terrain the bings are highly changeable environments, providing a dry and windy habitat for grasses and rare plants, while small bricks and other ephemera periodically punctuate their brittle surface and serve as reminders of their industrial facture. Although the bings are not generally considered to have any public benefit, over the past four decades their quasi-Martian landscape has become environmentally valuable, offering research opportunities to conservation agencies that may help to permanently preserve them all from the threat of extraction. While two of Niddrie Woman's four bings have already been officially classed as monuments and are therefore no longer under threat, the remaining two have been under consideration since 2006 and planning permission has already been granted to extract the second largest bing known as Niddry (the 'Heart' of Niddrie Woman within Latham's scheme).

As early as 1975, however, the Scottish Development Agency, troubled by the visual presence of the bings and uninterested in their historical value, sought the advice of John Latham in his capacity as artist in residence, a position brokered by the APG which placed artists within industrial, governmental or administrative settings. According to Derek Lyddon, Chief Planner of the Scottish Development Agency at the time of Latham's residency:

The object of APG placements may be described as 'organisation and imagination'; to place an artist in an organisation in the hope that his creative intelligence or imagination can spark off ideas, possibilities and actions that have not previously been perceived or considered feasible; in other words to show the feasibility of initiating what has not occurred to others to initiate. Hence the product is not an art work, but a report by the artist on new ways of looking at the chosen work areas and on the action that might result. 2

Latham's conceptualisation of the bings as 'process sculptures' was compelling to the Scottish civil servants and initiated ideas for their conservation before legal mechanisms were put in place to protect post-industrial heritage. With the artist now dead, the challenge facing Latham supporters is, first, to ensure that all four bings that comprise Niddrie Woman are permanently conserved as a heritage site, and secondly, that this prompts fuller recognition of Latham's sculptural concepts. Far from failing, Latham's research and activism remains one of the keystones to the preservation of other threatened bings in the region. In the early 1980s, for instance, the Scottish Office re-invited Latham to publicly defend the classification of the Five Sisters bings as 'monuments', disputed by businesses keen to use the valuable shale for building material. However, the Public Enquiry did not take place following the last-minute withdrawal of the appeal, leaving Latham unable to make a similar public case for other sites, namely Niddrie Woman. 3 However, like his later site-related research, including a visit funded by The Henry Moore Foundation in the 1990s, much has been archived and hidden away as unrecognised facets within a lifetime's, albeit incomplete, project. This essay attempts to address the latter, and to promote his APG work in Scotland from the margins of his oeuvre for, despite the contemporary interest in art and ecology and the level of critical attention paid to questions of energy production and waste disposal, these reconceived piles of waste remain to be validated art historically.

Fig.1
John Latham
Documents as Part of APG Feasibility Study - Scottish Office 1976
Tate Archive TGA 20042/9
© Courtesy John Latham Estate and Lisson Gallery

Verifiable evidence of the effectiveness of Latham's placement in Scotland can be found in the APG archive at Tate, which includes detailed commentary, illustrations and photographs of the shale bings as well as Latham's various proposals for interventions. Although governed by a set of practical protocols, APG placements always retained an 'open brief' which allowed the artist, or 'incidental person', the freedom 'to spark off ideas, possibilities and actions', while semi-predetermined outcomes partially informed by the holder's artistic oeuvre were considered acceptable as long as the right artist was aligned with the right project. An artist's contract concluded with longer-term proposals, known as a Feasibility Study, which included ideas for mutually agreed, realisable artwork. 4 In Latham's case, additional proposals for sea cultivation, nuclear energy, and portable video-broadcast technology for the local community all suggest that Latham networked furiously during his residency. However, his Feasibility Study lacks objective analysis and by turns is sentimental and ponderous, philosophical and stoic. His commentary is biting and highly subjective, castigating planning decisions that failed to consider 'the bigger picture'.

Admittedly, Latham's Feasibility Study was not designed to implant pseudo-scientific rhetoric within an already unusual contractual arrangement and its more tangible proposals were indeed coherently summarised by the civil servants. While it is unclear for whom his ambitious proposals were intended, it should certainly be presumed that Latham wished for them to become operational. In this respect it is important to iterate that, right from the beginning, Latham was seeking to make artworks befitting his own individual practice while following the APG's and others' methodologies. His proposals relating to shale bings synthesised personal biography (consciously or not), derived benefits from earlier articulations of the ideas of the artist Gustav Metzger relating to making auto-destructive art including fragmentation, randomness, entropy, gravity and with the developed themes and aesthetics of destruction present in his own previous work. Fortunately, his supportive hosts at the Scottish Development Agency backed this synthesis of institutional methodology and personal experience, and Latham's intuitive reasoning was privileged throughout the placement.

Thus invited to address the question of what to do with the derelict land near Edinburgh and asked 'from which perspective would he be looking at Scotland', Latham pointed to a map of the country and apparently responded 'from this distance'. An aerial viewpoint was deemed by Latham to offer a perspective and scale of an otherwise unobtainable human consciousness, and played a hugely important role in his work. His 1971 film Erth, for example, which was funded by The National Coal Board, comprises a journey through a black void space from which still images of an ever closer Earth appear, and culminates in numerous nearly illegible images from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 5 There is some kind of wilful confusion in this work but, according to the art critic John A. Walker, the viewpoint provides a metaphorical perspective that is 'necessary if humanity is to see itself objectively'. 6 Seeking once more the distinctiveness of an aerial perspective as a feature in graphic display (it is intriguing how his assemblage paintings made from books also resemble ravaged landscapes seen from above) Latham's initial research in the Scottish Development Agency's aerial photography archive provided his first informed glimpse of the derelict land between Winchburgh and Broxburn.

In this first, mediated introduction to the landscape, Latham determined that the largest shale bing known as Greendykes and its adjoining bings known as Niddry, Faucheldean and Albyn constituted historic documents that 'unconsciously' lent themselves to 'a modern variant of Celtic Legend, namely NIDDRIE WOMAN' (Latham's underlining). 7 Using the aerial perspective afforded by a single surveillance photograph Latham anthropomorphised Greendykes as the 'Torso', Faucheldean as the 'Limb', Niddry as the 'Heart' and Albyn as the 'Head', comprising the torn figure of a woman whose disembodied 'Heart' is too large to fit inside her approximately-scaled body. The Feasibility Study also mentions a visual comparison with the prehistoric carving The Venus of Willendorf (Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna). This surrealist and perverse homage was less of an imposition than it might at first seem: the terrain of England is populated with ancient images cut into chalk hillsides, such as the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire and the Cerne Giant in Dorset. As an experienced traveller across England and Scotland, Latham may have sought to make the bings a comparably emblematic feature of the Scottish landscape.

The subsequent phase of Latham's research involved on-site visits to the bings where he conducted an extensive series of topographical surveys that were more psychogeographic than cartographic. Eschewing conventional research methods, the Feasibility Study comprises snapshots and notes that record Latham's enchantment with the huge mounds of shale, and contains little or no reliable historical information. It testifies instead to Latham's interest in the unconscious design of the bings and how he came to notice that while their looming weightiness imposed themselves over the otherwise unremarkable residential conurbations, their summits offered vantage points and their fissures and joins provided isolated spaces for private contemplation. The Feasibility Study is also where Latham urges for the bings, being materially unique, to remain tethered to their topographical and social context in order to preserve them as unconsciously-formed sculptural monuments and to draw attention to all of their visual and mythical associations. By way of contrast, Latham's contemporaneous photographs of Glasgow's slum back courts, half-built motorway bridges and other oddly constructed civic features record innate failings in the urban environment formed by conscious efforts. According to the APG, commercial and civic administration more often than not suppressed, hid or simply failed to adequately support creativity, hence the need for an incidental person to work through unconscious routes. The interplay between textual and visual material in Latham's Feasibility Study make it a reflective journal, one that gives the shale bings a meaning that simply did not exist beforehand. 8

Fig.2
John Latham
Scottish Office Placement 75/76 1976
Tate Archive TGA 20042/7/1/11
© Courtesy John Latham Estate and Lisson Gallery

Niddrie Woman was described by the art critic Lucy Lippard in 1983 as a 'pun on female earth, rebirth, modern society's treatment of women's bodies as castoffs, and so forth'. 9 While Latham can hardly be described as a punster (if anything he was deeply mistrustful of language), gendering the shale bings and associating them with prehistory was an astute thing to do for it reconceived them for the purposes of ecological preservation and tapped into the strain of 1970s art that Lippard would later describe as the 'upsurge of interest among avant-garde artists in "primitivism"'. 10 Latham's Feasibility Study - which makes reference to the Scottish Neolithic settlements Skara Brae and Callanish - only serves to strengthen this association, while Lippard herself compares Niddrie Woman to Silbury Hill, a prehistoric mound in Wiltshire. 11 However, not only are these comparisons inadequate (Silbury Hill, despite being the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, is considerably smaller than Niddrie Woman) but they also propose a misleading relationship to prehistory when the bings are simply residual products of Victorian industry, which at the time of their making held no meaningful symbolism or community purpose other than as local deposits of waste. Furthermore, Latham's reconception offered no practical solution to what was essentially a material problem and the strategic misapprehension of the bings as prehistoric meant that the early reception of Latham's proposals tended towards heritage-based categories and not those of art.

The scale of Latham's proposals was quite different from the light-footed English land art of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and the location of his interventions was unlike the frontier lands evoked by the work of American artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt. Rather, it is Scottish conceptual art that offers the most rewarding comparisons with Latham's work - art for which transformation and transmutation were key. For example, Glen Onwin's exhibition Saltmarsh - which inaugurated the new Scottish Arts Council Gallery in Edinburgh just prior to Latham's APG residency - made manifest Onwin's obsession with elementary materials and their geological importance at a coastal site near Edinburgh. 12 Meanwhile the enduring popularity in Scotland of the work of Joseph Beuys (an artist with whom Latham would verbally joust), and in particular his conjoining of Fluxus artistic strategies and ritual processes that recast the emergent Duchampian tradition with a spiritual dimension, was of relevant concern to the visual arts in Edinburgh at this time. 13

Fig.3
Documents as Part of APG Feasibility Study - Scottish Office 1976
Tate Archive TGA 20042/9
© Courtesy John Latham Estate and Lisson Gallery

Further south, an obvious precursor to the APG's and Latham's programme of research related to the mining industries was the photographic series produced by German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The scholarship awarded to the Bechers by the British Council in 1966, with assistance provided by the National Coal Board, meant that the results of their photographic survey of major industrial areas in England and Wales 'were consequently vastly better than anything [they] had been able to accomplish before'. 14 Comparing the Bechers's artistic methodology with the poetically and politically-inflected practices supported by the APG would be stretch. While the Becher's survey is elegant and technically precise, Latham's Feasibility Study is diffuse and ponderous. However, both are elegiac in their representation of derelict sites of energy production at a moment of industrial decline in the North.

Comparing Latham's work with that of Gustav Metzger, however, is far more instructive, for while the looming bings were considered eyesores of spent energy by the Scottish civil servants, their material formation conformed to Metzger's typology of auto-destructive art, defined in 1965 'as a form of public art ... a unity of idea, site, form, colour, time and disintegrative process', comprising falling, sliding and peeling 'materials in various stages of transformation'. 15 Latham's proposals for the shale bings also link back to the material transformation of his own Skoob Towers (c.1964-8), which were contemporaneous with Metzger's first auto-destructive ideas. These columns of burnt and burning books ('Skoob' is the word 'books' in reverse) intended to make 'the viewer aware of ... the indivisibility of past, present and future', an indivisibility Latham would emphasise in his Feasibility Study. 16

Surprisingly, little exhibition material was produced to record Latham's ambitions for the bings, which included proposals for steps and notice boards, the preparation of historical records and the incorporation of commissioned artworks resulting from further artists' placements. 17 Latham's own proposal for post-Feasibility commissioning was for a twenty-four metre iconic beacon-sculpture to be called Handbook of Reason. Although this enormous intersecting book form was rejected by the Scottish Development Agency on cost grounds, mock-ups and the Feasibility Studyoffer glimpses of what such a towering monument would have brought to the site if it were realised (fig.3). Its resemblance to a cruciform was noted, although the collages and sketches in the Feasibility Study illustrate a more recognisable book sculpture with interwoven pages.

This proposal is in many ways inconsistent with Latham's advocacy of non-intervention in the landscape. 18 However, Latham was operating under funded patronage, for which it would be expected he would offer proposals relating to his well-known work. More fundamentally, the intention of both strategies (of intervention and non-intervention) was to preserve the site, albeit in different ways. While the Feasibility Study makes occasional reference to those living in the locale, to community identity and to social coherence, the expediency of a proposal was to be evaluated by the internationally informed. The APG later noted they had 'not had the means of canvassing the proposals put forward in the actual areas. The first need has been to test international opinion at its informed points on the likely subsequent acclaim, and following a positive response such as has been found, to estimate the benefits likely to accrue to the neighbourhood'. 19 Latham was not therefore acting as a consultative community artist but was seeking to make a work of art that would attract the attention of his intended audience, the international avant-garde. However, while criticisms can be levelled at the ethics of this approach, history has proved that almost nothing relevant about Latham's reconceptualisation of the shale bing complex had been transmitted effectively to either the international art cognoscenti or the local community.

Fig.4
Shale from Broxburn 2008
© StrawbleuTM

What, therefore, is the legacy of Latham's placement? Although all the bings are considered to possess important environmental and social value, the 'Heart' of Niddrie Woman has been top-mined for motorway infill material to the wider detriment of the environment. The nearby Five Sisters bing complex, however, is now preserved under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act. Geoscientist Barbra Harvie's 2005 report West Lothian Biodiversity Action Plan: Oil Shale Bings proposed that the area's shale bings 'are a unique habitat, not found elsewhere in Britain or Western Europe', a vital recreation area and 'a focus of community identity'. 20Herplan maintained that for such a developing and unique habitat 'the best management of oil shale bings is no management' as they are 'island refugia'with a considerable diversity of very rare plants species. 21

Harvie's report - by inadvertently contributing to Latham's view that his artistic ideas had not been conveyed (for he thought sculpture to be a better classification than heritage) - indicates the difficulties and differences in ascribing fixed terms to a landscape. However, the four bings in question arguably benefit from having multiple meanings: Niddrie Woman is a conflation of heritage and art, and both require reaffirmation by the region's civic and governmental authorities. In this respect it may be more worthwhile to consider the bings within a complex socio-political matrix: as landscape, leisure space, industrial monument and heritage site. Forcing a distinction between land art and landscape-as-art is inhibitive, not least because Latham's project remains tangential to art history. Even if it were more readily included in surveys of land art, or process or conceptual art, Latham's insistence upon a figurative reference for Niddrie Woman distinguishes it from the minimalist earthworks derived from crosses, circles, cubes, spirals and tubes. Pushing at the boundaries of sculpture, even in the 'expanded field', Niddrie Woman remains an intrinsically unclassifiable artwork: part scheduled monument, part site of biological diversity, part disappearing.

How to cite

Craig Richardson, 'Waste to Monument: John Latham's Niddrie Woman: Art & Environment', in Tate Papers, no.17, Spring 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/17/waste-to-monument-john-lathams-niddrie-woman, accessed 27 May 2021.
Tate Papers (ISSN 1753-9854) is a peer-reviewed research journal that publishes articles on British and modern international art, and on museum practice today.

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waste to monument: john latham’s niddrie woman: art & environment

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Waste to Monument: John Latham's Niddrie Woman: Art & Environment - Tate Papers | Tate

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Resembling extinct volcanoes that rise to a height of ninety-five metres in places, these irregular and often top-sliced cones of burnt and oxidised waste are the residual product of a mid-nineteenth-century mining process designed to extract and distil products from oil-bearing shale for use as paraffin fuel.

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For John Hume, it started with a boyhood fascination of watching newly-built battleships voyage down the Clyde which led to a collection of more than 25,000 photographs of Scotland's fading industrial heritage.

His aim was simple - to create an exhaustive record of the factories, shipyards, mills and steelworks which were all facing the wrecking ball.

The 83-year-old would later turn his passion professional, playing key roles in preservation bodies.

But Mr Hume told BBC Scotland his attitude to preserving the country's industrial heritage is the same now as it was in the 1960s.

"It comes back to affection," he said. "If we could preserve the people that we knew when we loved them - mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, friends - we would love to do that.

"We would have a library of people that we would go and see. Well that's the same with buildings, and machines, and books and you name it.

"You know that if you can express that feeling for something by preserving it, then people can come to see it in the future and see what you loved, and see what they can love in it."

Mr Hume started taking pictures of under-threat industrial sites in the 1960s and carried on until the 1980s with the collection of more than 25,000 photographs now held by Historic Environment Scotland (HES).

It was in that early period where his cataloguing work, especially around his native Glasgow, felt most critical, he said.

'Last chance to document this way of life'

The industrial-era buildings in Scotland's largest city faced a number of threats, not least their own commercial decline but also the huge swathes of land needed for the M8 motorway.

He said: "In the 1960s there was a palpable sense that things were changing, the old ways were dying out.

"I realise now, but not at the time, that the reason I got into many places was because the directors or managers knew what was coming - that this was the last chance to document this way of life."

As a junior university lecturer in the 1960s, Mr Hume was part of a small band of people battling to get industrial archaeology to be treated equally with more traditional fields.

He said: "It is hard to think of it now but nobody wanted to know back then, it was a real struggle.

"I just wanted our industrial heritage to be on the same footing and have the same respect as a medieval cathedral, because they have both contributed valuably to our world."

Mr Hume's passion for preservation went from the voluntary to professional and he undertook a number of key roles in the preservation world in his working life, notably as Scotland's Chief Inspector of Historic Buildings and then chairman of the now defunct Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

They were roles where Mr Hume's impact on protecting the country's industrial heritage is still felt today.

Buildings given listed status where Mr Hume played a role include the giant cranes of Clydebank and Finnieston in Glasgow, the White Cart Bridge in Renfrew, Central and Waverley railway stations and Queensberry House, now an integral part of the Scottish Parliament.

Asked if there were as many modern industrial buildings that deserved documenting for future generations to enjoy as where in his collection, Mr Hume said it was "unlikely".

The retired academic added: "If you look at the buildings built after 1950, very few are that good or indeed last that long and I think part of the issue is we are losing sight of the fact that buildings are not about bricks or steel, they should be about people.

"We seem to have have lost the concept that buildings should make us feel better."

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The man who captured a fading industrial Scotland

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For John Hume, it started with a boyhood fascination of watching newly-built battleships voyage down the Clyde which led to a collection of more than 25,000 photographs of Scotland's fading industrial heritage. His aim was simple - to create an exhaustive record of the factories, shipyards, mills and steelworks which were all facing the wrecking ball.

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we can all leave notes here.

List of possible activities:

trip to Wee Museum of Memory in Livingston/session with WLC collections objects/meet with older residents for exchange of stories: https://www.livingmemory.org.uk/westLothian.php

Walk and collection session on Five Sisters Bings/walk&talk sessions (optional for those interested) with Robin Chesters on industry/Barbara Harvey on biodiversity/Matt Calder of Community heritage trust (https://www.facebook.com/WestCalderandHarburnCDT/)

Walk and collection session on the "dirty bing" (Hermand)/possible fossil cracking session with Robin Chesters/session on fun geology with James Rae

Developing and making session with Lisa (and Darya?) at the West Calder Community Centre

Trip to Almond Valley Heritage Centre/Museum of Scottish Oil Shale Industry in Livingston/guided tour (optional, for those who are interested) with Robin Chesters and/or Lorna the curator.

Exhibition making session with Lisa (and Darya?) in the West Calder community centre.

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F19046, first published 31st December 2019

From the top of Hermand oil works bing you can enjoy a panoramic view across the Firth of Forth to the green fields of Fife, past the Bathgate and Ochil hills, and beyond to the Highlands of Perthshire. In the advent of a nuclear attack, the site might provide a grandstand view of the destruction of Scotland's capital, the conflagration of Grangemouth, and mushroom clouds on the western skyline marking the end of industrial Lanarkshire. It is with prospect in mind that the bing was chosen, in 1959, as site for construction of a Royal Observer Corps monitoring post.

The Royal Observer Corps was a volunteer organisation formed in 1925 to serve as "the ears and eyes of the air force". During the second world war they played a vital role in reporting enemy aircraft movements, but in a subsequent age of radar and high altitude jets, they could make little useful contribution to defence and plans were drawn up to disband the organisation. However, with the growing prospect of nuclear conflict, a new role was found for the Corps. Rather than spotting aircraft, they were tasked with front-line reporting in the advent of a nuclear strike. From 1956 a network of almost 1,500 underground monitoring posts were built throughout the length and breadth of Britain. West Lothian received only three posts; the West Calder ROC post on top of Hermand bing, close to the West Calder to Harburn road, the Bathgate ROC post near Crosshill Drive, and the Bo'ness ROC post near the club house of the West Lothian golf club. These were all part of the ROC No.24 group, whose HQ were in a bunker beneath RAF Turnhouse.

Each monitoring post consisted of a small room within a reinforced concrete box, covered by at least three feet of soil and accessed through a manhole and a 19ft long vertical steel ladder. This was intended to provide some protection against a nuclear blast and reduce exposure to radiation. Little showed about the surface other than filter equipment to cleanse incoming air and various pieces of monitoring equipment. At times of threat, the posts were manned by part-time volunteers of the ROC, who were issued with a uniform and paid a nominal fee for the time spent at their post. Recruitment advertisements portrayed membership of the corps as suitable for "men and women between the ages of 16 and 60 who are looking for an interesting, worthwhile hobby".

East post was equipped with bunk beds, a chemical toilet and had ration packs "containing biscuits. steak and kidney pudding, tea, sugar, milk, etc. which would sustain three men without contact with the outside world for three days."

In the event of a nuclear attack, the monitoring post would report levels of radiation, other measurements, and readings from the "ground zero indicator". This was little more than a drum lined with photographic paper which some poor soul would need to emerge from the bunker to retrieve. When developed, this provided an indication of the intensity and direction of the blast.

We should be eternally thankful that none of these systems and contingency plans were ever tested in anger. Following the fall of Berlin Wall and the removal of the soviet threat, the ROC were disbanded in 1991.

Today many ROC observation posts survived locked and forgotten in remote parts of the country. The West Calder post was abandoned in 1991, and in 2005 it was still possible to climb down into the bunker and survey a scatter of papers and furniture, while a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen smiled calmly down from the wall. Since then, much of the spent shale has been quarried away, and for number of years the exposed sides of the concrete room hung perilously at the edge of the bing. The concrete box now sits, almost upside down, at the foot of the bing; a monument to a horror which thankfully never arrived.

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F19046, first published 31st December 2019 From the top of Hermand oil works bing you can enjoy a panoramic view across the Firth of Forth to the green fields of Fife, past the Bathgate and Ochil hills, and beyond to the Highlands of Perthshire.

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James Young chose to site his great oil works at Addiewell where there appeared to be an abundance of oil-rich shales, along with coal to fuel the processes. Addiewell Chemical Works was one of the largest industrial complexes in Scotland at that time, and took almost four years to construct.

The oil shales mined at Addiewell proved to be some of the most oil-rich in Scotland, with seams close to the surface that could be easily worked. In some cases both oil shale and coal were worked at the same pit. The seams of oil shale however were often more narrow than usual elsewhere and extended over only a limited area. The minerals in the vicinity of the works were quickly exhausted, and mining was soon extended to the Baads Estate south of Addiewell, and the lands of Polbeth to the east.

While construction of Addiewell Chemical Works was still underway, stockpiles of shale and coal were accumulated from a number of nearby pits and mines. In 1865, the Scotsman reported:
"....six pits (are) being worked night and day. These pits are quite close to where the new buildings will stand, and are within a short distance of each other. The deepest of these pits is sixty fathoms, and it contains two seams that are being simultaneously wrought. The topmost consists of shale and the lower one of ordinary fuel."
An article in Glasgow Herald dated 20th October 1870 mentions a series of 13 pits then worked by Young's company, and provides details of ten of them:

No.1 pit: 34 fathoms to coal and 51 fathoms to shale

No.2 pit: 52 fathoms to coal and 82.5 fathoms to shale

No.5 pit: 17.5 fathoms to shale

No.7 pit: 30.5 fathoms to shale

No.8 pit: 44 fathoms to shale

No.9 pit: 35.5 fathoms to shale

No.10 pit: 28.5 fathoms to shale

No.11 pit: 70 fathoms to coal and 102 fathoms to shale

No.12 pit: 24 fathoms to shale

No.13 pit: 35 fathoms to shale

The article indicates that the relatively narrow seams of shale found in the area were worked "almost universally" by the long-wall method. Pits had a single shaft, divided into two with a timber partition to effect ventilation; a practice that was soon to be banned following the Starlaw disaster of 1870.

While the sites of all 13 pits have been identified, the status of various mines shown on some mining plans remains uncertain. it appears that Young's may have numbered mines in a different sequence from its pits.

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James Young chose to site his great oil works at Addiewell where there appeared to be an abundance of oil-rich shales, along with coal to fuel the processes. Addiewell Chemical Works was one of the largest industrial complexes in Scotland at that time, and took almost four years to construct.

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F17021, first published 17th May 2017

Seams of oilshale often contained layers of unproductive blaes, ribs of cement stone, iron-rich nodules and other waste material that had to worked along with the oil shale, brought to the surface, and then dumped at the pithead. Modest bings of this black pit waste still mark the site of some former shale pits, but are gradually disappearing as land is redeveloped or landowners quarry the tips to repair roads or fill in areas of subsidence.

A good part of the pithead tip of the Broxburn Oil Company's Crossgreen mine (which closed 1910) has been excavated in recent years, giving a clean cross section of waste accumulated over a couple of decades of operation. Some unexceptional fossils can be found among the laminated shales while iron-rich nodules can be hammered open to reveal glittering iron pyrites with black specks that might once have been shreds of vegetation or perhaps fish scales. Buried amongst the waste stone there are also occasion relics of the mining operations; pieces of pit timber, bolts, rail spikes, short lengths of rail, and odd pieces of pit hutch.

Above: A cementstone nodule with a beautiful skin of black shiny oilshale.

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F17021, first published 17th May 2017 Seams of oilshale often contained layers of unproductive blaes, ribs of cement stone, iron-rich nodules and other waste material that had to worked along with the oil shale, brought to the surface, and then dumped at the pithead.

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F19046, first published 31st December 2019

From the top of Hermand oil works bing you can enjoy a panoramic view across the Firth of Forth to the green fields of Fife, past the Bathgate and Ochil hills, and beyond to the Highlands of Perthshire. In the advent of a nuclear attack, the site might provide a grandstand view of the destruction of Scotland's capital, the conflagration of Grangemouth, and mushroom clouds on the western skyline marking the end of industrial Lanarkshire. It is with prospect in mind that the bing was chosen, in 1959, as site for construction of a Royal Observer Corps monitoring post.

The Royal Observer Corps was a volunteer organisation formed in 1925 to serve as "the ears and eyes of the air force". During the second world war they played a vital role in reporting enemy aircraft movements, but in a subsequent age of radar and high altitude jets, they could make little useful contribution to defence and plans were drawn up to disband the organisation. However, with the growing prospect of nuclear conflict, a new role was found for the Corps. Rather than spotting aircraft, they were tasked with front-line reporting in the advent of a nuclear strike. From 1956 a network of almost 1,500 underground monitoring posts were built throughout the length and breadth of Britain. West Lothian received only three posts; the West Calder ROC post on top of Hermand bing, close to the West Calder to Harburn road, the Bathgate ROC post near Crosshill Drive, and the Bo'ness ROC post near the club house of the West Lothian golf club. These were all part of the ROC No.24 group, whose HQ were in a bunker beneath RAF Turnhouse.

Each monitoring post consisted of a small room within a reinforced concrete box, covered by at least three feet of soil and accessed through a manhole and a 19ft long vertical steel ladder. This was intended to provide some protection against a nuclear blast and reduce exposure to radiation. Little showed about the surface other than filter equipment to cleanse incoming air and various pieces of monitoring equipment. At times of threat, the posts were manned by part-time volunteers of the ROC, who were issued with a uniform and paid a nominal fee for the time spent at their post. Recruitment advertisements portrayed membership of the corps as suitable for "men and women between the ages of 16 and 60 who are looking for an interesting, worthwhile hobby".

East post was equipped with bunk beds, a chemical toilet and had ration packs "containing biscuits. steak and kidney pudding, tea, sugar, milk, etc. which would sustain three men without contact with the outside world for three days."

In the event of a nuclear attack, the monitoring post would report levels of radiation, other measurements, and readings from the "ground zero indicator". This was little more than a drum lined with photographic paper which some poor soul would need to emerge from the bunker to retrieve. When developed, this provided an indication of the intensity and direction of the blast.

We should be eternally thankful that none of these systems and contingency plans were ever tested in anger. Following the fall of Berlin Wall and the removal of the soviet threat, the ROC were disbanded in 1991.

Today many ROC observation posts survived locked and forgotten in remote parts of the country. The West Calder post was abandoned in 1991, and in 2005 it was still possible to climb down into the bunker and survey a scatter of papers and furniture, while a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen smiled calmly down from the wall. Since then, much of the spent shale has been quarried away, and for number of years the exposed sides of the concrete room hung perilously at the edge of the bing. The concrete box now sits, almost upside down, at the foot of the bing; a monument to a horror which thankfully never arrived.

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F19046, first published 31st December 2019 From the top of Hermand oil works bing you can enjoy a panoramic view across the Firth of Forth to the green fields of Fife, past the Bathgate and Ochil hills, and beyond to the Highlands of Perthshire.

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Redwood lists an oil works at Hermand that was operated by Thornton between 1864 and 1870. This seems likely to be the "Hermand Shale Oil Works" which valuation rolls record were owned by Thomas and James Thornton between 1867 and 1875. Two other oil works are known to have operated within the Hermand estate; the East Hermand Crude Oil Works (in existence between 1866 and 1873) and the Hermand Oil Works (in existence between c.1883 and 1894).

The location of the Hermand Shale Oil Works is not plotted on any known map, but seem likely to have been sited close to Hermand Old Rows that the Thornton Brothers constructed during the 1860's to house their workforce.

A succession of grassed promontories project into the valley on the west side of the Harwood Water at a site south of Murray's Pool bridge, and about 150m from the site of Hermand Old Rows. Where the grass has eroded it can be seen that this landform is composed of "red blaes" (spent shale) and seem likely to have been tip points where hutches of spent shale from a nearby oil works would be tipped into the river valley. The second edition OS map (c.1893), surveyed following closure of the works, shows the landform much as it exists today. The first edition OS map (c.1858) however shows that the Harwood Water once followed a very different course and seems to have been diverted as a consequence of tipping spent shale and other industrial activity.

Between the promontories, an earthwork following an even grade up the steep slope from the river can still be discerned. This feature is also marked on the 1893 OS map. Evidence on the ground suggest that shale was worked from an adit on the east of the Harwood Water (See Hermand Murray's Pool mine) then moved a short distance to the foot of a tramway incline from where it would be hauled on a bridge across the river and then up the valley side. The earthworks at the top of the incline are now obscured, suggesting that the land in this area was regraded following demolition of the oil works.

It is assumed therefore that the oil works was sited south of the Old Hermand Rows and west of the Harwood Water.

Mapped by the Ordnance Survey of c.1897.

Recent images

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Redwood lists an oil works at Hermand that was operated by Thornton between 1864 and 1870. This seems likely to be the "Hermand Shale Oil Works" which valuation rolls record were owned by Thomas and James Thornton between 1867 and 1875.

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COLLABORATION WITH PHILOSOPHER MICHAEL MARDER & BIO-GENETICIAN MARTIN HAJDUCH

2011 - ongoing
Location: Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl, Ukraine_Radiation level: 1.7 Ms/ hour
35 Rayograms, 24x36 cm, Pigment Print on RAG Paper

2011- en cours
Zone d'exclusion, Tchernobyl, Ukraine - Niveau de radiation: 1.7 microsieverts/h
35 rayogrammes, 24x36 cm, Impression pigmentaire sur papier RAG

Le 26 avril 1986, à 1h 23 minutes et 44 secondes, un test de puissance à la centrale de Tchernobyl, tourne à la catastrophe. Le cœur du réacteur n° 4 explose, laissant s'échapper un nuage de particules radioactives dans l'atmosphère.

Ce projet est composé d'un rayogramme par année passée depuis l'explosion, créé par l'empreinte directe de spécimens d'un herbarium radioactif sur des plaques photosensibles. Ces végétaux furent au préalable cultivés dans le sol de la Zone d'exclusion par l'équipe du bio-généticien Martin Hajduch qui étudie les conséquences de la radioactivité sur la flore dans les zones fortement irradiées, autour de la centrale.
Traces matérielles d'un désastre invisible, ces images sont capturées au seuil du visible Elles invitent, avec les textes du philosophe Michael Marder, à penser, signifier, symboliser, aussi impensable et irreprésentable soit-il, la conscience que cet événement a fragmentée, et peut-être ouvrir la voie à un mode de vie plus en accord avec l'environnement.

On Saturday, April 26th, 1986, at 1:23:58 a.m. local time, a test in Chernobyl nuclear plant takes a disastrous turn. The core of reactor No.4 explodes, emitting a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and drifted across the then Western Soviet Union and Europe.

This project is composed of a rayogram per year passed since the explosion, created by the direct imprint of specimens from a radioactive herbarium on photosensitive plates. These plants grew in the soils of Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, studied by the team of bio geneticain Martin Hajduch* who analyses the impacts of radioactivity on the flora.

Material traces of an invisible disaster, these images are captured on the edge of the visible. Alongside, 35 fragments of texts by philosopher Michael Marder, they invite to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize it, taking stock of the consciousness the accident fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.

"It's a stroke of genius to have miniaturized something so vast and demonic-we don't even know how to dream any of this yet (it's called ecological awareness), and as Marder observes here, just upgrading our aesthetics to cope with the trauma of this awareness is a key unfinished project."

- Timothy Morton, 2016

Open Humanities Press, 2016
OPEN ACCESS in English
==>Translation in French
Editions de la Fondation Mindscape, 2016
==>Translation in Basque & Spanish
Edition Cristina Enea Fundaziao, 2017

Partial Danish translation
Baggrund, 2016
==>Partial Portuguese translation, Brazsil 2019
==>

Open Humanities Press, 2016
OPEN ACCESS en anglais
==>

Traduction en français
Éditions de la Fondation Mindscape, 2016
==>

Traduction en basque et espagnol
Edition Cristina Enea Fundaziao, 2017

Traduction partielle en danois
Baggrund, 2016
==>Traduction partielle en portuguais Brazsil, 2019
==>

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COLLABORATION WITH PHILOSOPHER MICHAEL MARDER & BIO-GENETICIAN MARTIN HAJDUCH 2011 - ongoing Location: Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl, Ukraine_Radiation level: 1.7 Ms/ hour 35 Rayograms, 24x36 cm, Pigment Print on RAG Paper 2011- en coursZone d'exclusion, Tchernobyl, Ukraine - Niveau de radiation: 1.7 microsieverts/h35 rayogrammes, 24x36 cm, Impression pigmentaire sur papier RAG On Saturday, April 26th, 1986, at 1:23:58 a.m.

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Moving Mountains: West Lothian’s Shale Bings in the 20th Century

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Moving Mountains: West Lothian’s Shale Bings in the 20th Century

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West Lothian Local Biodiversity Action Plan: Oil Shale Bings

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West Lothian Local Biodiversity Action Plan: Oil Shale Bings