Golfers face deep bunker

The West Lothian Courier have teamed up with our friends at the Almond Valley Heritage Trust to give our readers photos and stories from West Lothian’s past. Bathgate does not quite fit with the romantic ideal of a Scottish golf course.

There is no sound of waves breaking on the beach beyond the links or any cry of eagles soaring above a secluded Highland glen.

Instead Bathgate’s golfers once enjoyed the clatter and ring of coal wagons shunted in the sidings that wrapped around the northern part of the course and the roar of industry from the steel foundry and pits that marked the western and southern boundaries.

A working sand quarry at the centre of the course added further interest.

Deposits of sand and gravel, a legacy from the ice age, lay only a few feet beneath fields to the south of town, around the site of the medieval Bathgate Castle.

A small sand pit is shown on the 1850s Ordnance Survey map to the south-east of Bathgate station, which by the 1890s had been considerably extended and linked by a railway siding.

Our postcard shows these simple quarry workings in operation. Over the next decade operations were considerably extended under the ownership of local builder and contractor Thomas Johnston but were abandoned prior to 1914, by which time other sand pits were in operation to the east of Bathgate Castle.

When the golf course was first opened in 1894 with nine holes great skill was required to avoid the sand quarry workings and when reconstructed in 1907 and extended to 18 holes the sand quarry continued to add to the challenge of play.

An account of the new course noted:“The twelfth is the old home hole with the drive over the quarry, which tries the nerve of the golfer, being disastrous to the topped drive”.

The disused sand pit seems to have provided a natural amphitheatre for play, picnics and public events for many years but was gradually infilled as the course was remodelled and improved.