The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Leadhills Miners’ Library is enjoying a landmark anniversary, writes Dani Garavelli
The first subscription library in the UK is 275 years old this month. But as its guardians prepare to celebrate, the traditions it pioneered have never been under greater threat
TAKE the B7040 near Elvanfoot on an autumn day, follow it up through hills of burnished ochre and across tributaries flowing to the Clyde, and you arrive in Leadhills, the second highest village in Scotland. Once upon a time, this landscape was industrial, pockmarked by mine shafts and a lead smelting plant, its noxious fumes carried on the prevailing wind.
Today, though, it is eerily quiet; its population shrunk to just over 300, its church locked up, its bakeries, butcher and tailors gone. The only testaments to its heritage are the grey scars on the slopes, the tidy rows of slate-roofed cottages, the curfew bell, which rang to signal the change in shifts, and the miners’ library.
It is the last of these I have come to see. Housed in a converted cottage, with a narrow gabled porch and gridded windows, it has no aura of of historical import. But as the first subscription library in the UK, it established a tradition of working-class learning that was to become as deeply embedded as the tonnes of galena ore that still lie beneath a landscape known as God’s Treasure House.
Within a few decades of the library’s founding, the belief that everyone should have access to books had made its way down from the Lowther Hills. Similar ventures started springing up in rural outposts and industrial heartlands across the UK. By the 1850s, it was such an established tenet, an Act was passed to give local authorities the power to set up public libraries, though, ultimately, it was Andrew Carnegie’s money that brought many of them into being.
Inside the Leadhills library, which now serves as a museum, the weathered tomes the miners once pored over sit alongside a display of minerals – chalcopyrite, susannite
and leadhillite – which sparkle and shine. The religious and political tracts, the guides to far-flung corners of the globe, the first editions of novels by Sir Walter Scott and Anthony Trollope were also gems lending lustre to lives of toil. The phrase “learning makes the genius bright” is emblazoned on an old pulpit, from which the president would address the monthly meetings. The line is taken from a verse by Leadhills-born poet Allan Ramsay, after whom the library was originally named. “As the rough di’mond from the mine/ In breakings only shows its light/ ’Till polishing has made it shine/ Thus learning makes the genius bright,” he wrote in his pastoral play The Gentle Shepherd.
Later this month, the library, founded in 1741, will celebrate its 275th anniversary; villagers will meet in its single musty room to look at the newly-restored banner, the oldest in the country, and hear about the latest efforts to preserve and, perhaps, digitise the collection. But those who are closest to it – its trustees and committee members – are conscious of an irony: as they work to raise awareness of its significance, the tradition of learning it pioneered is threatened.
Though the Scottish Government sees libraries as a priority, and has awarded £2.3 million in funding since it launched its libraries strategy last year, cuts in local authority budgets mean services are under pressure. The situation is worse in England; but, even here, 25 libraries have shut since 2010, with more closures planned. Staffing levels and opening hours have also been cut.
“Libraries have always been about social health and wellbeing,” says Pamela Tulloch, chief executive of the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC). “Back then, it was about education and self-improvement which in turn improved people’s life chances.