BOUNTIFUL BINGS
Rising from West Lothian farmland in rose gold peaks, the region’s iconic bings are a reminder of the region’s industrial history and of the enduring power of nature, finds Cal Flyn
Landmarks of the area's industrial heritage, the rose gold bings of West Calder are being reclaimed by nature
Afew miles outside of Edinburgh, in West Lothian, several strange landmarks rise from the farmland: round and irregular, or sheer-sided and steep. Rose gold gravel piled hundreds of metres high and grown over with wild grasses and lichens. They are bings, spoil heaps: souvenirs from this region’s past as an epicentre of industry.
For a brief period during the 19th century, Scotland was the world’s largest oil producer, thanks to the innovations of James ‘Paraffin’ Young, a Glasgow-born chemist who developed groundbreaking new methods of distillation. Oil shale, a type of bituminous rock abundant in that part of Scotland, was superheated to produce oil in the form of a vapour, which could then be separated into crude oil, paraffin oil, paraffin wax, coke and other products.
It was extremely profitable, and when Young’s patents ran out in 1864, 120 shale works sprang up in the region. At the industry’s peak, 600,000 barrels of oil a year were being produced there. But the process was highly wasteful too: for every ten barrels, more than six tons of spent shale were produced: mountains of stone chippings with the texture of broken terracotta, ranging in colour
from rose gold to brick red. These flakes of stone are known as ‘blaes’, and you might be familiar with them as the muchcursed, gritty surface of all-weather school sports pitches of a certain vintage.
These spoil heaps grew and grew, rising from the fields like loaves. Some, like the Five Sisters bing near West Calder, rose up in tight formation: five triangular peaks fanning out from a central point, with geometric simplicity. But more often they bulged and burst their banks, swallowing all they came into contact with: trees, fences, thatched cottages, farmyards.
Under the northernmost arm of the Five Sisters an entire Victorian country house, stone built and grand with a central cupola, lies entombed beneath the dry shale. The sixteenth