In a land far far away...

You have to go to the edges of our island to find some of the superlatives of the industrial heritage world -what of the most northerly coal mine? Would you expect Brora in Sutherland? That is right off the mark when it comes to the heartlands of coal in Scotland, as is the most westerly - the old coal mine run by Argyll Colliery at Drumlemble in Kintyre.

The bath-house still stands albeit put to new use as a byre, and there are a few doughty old fellas in Campbeltown who can still recount a tale of working at the coal face up to their waists in sea water in this extraordinary shallow mine tucked behind the dunes of Machrihanish beach. There was even a canal opened up, and a narrow-gauge railway,  to take coal across the flat neck of land that bounds the Mull of Kintyre, whispers of which can still be traced in the rich farming landscape.

The edges of Scotland, and for that matter large tracts of the less populated parts of Scotland may not usually have been able to boast the big labour forces but they had their heavy industry, and their industrial buildings. The tenements built to house the quarriers at Bonawe operated exactly like those in the Gorbals, but stood isolated at the end of a ten mile single track road at the edge of a beautiful loch. Some of the tenement kids are still in Bonawe. Drumlemble's miners' houses were similarly des res, but there the differences with gritty industrial towns stopped.

The work was as hard in these isolated industrial places as anywhere (remember the sea water from Machrihanish), and often less secure. Limestone quarriers on the superb 'industrial' island of Lismore with its network of kilns had to double up on their skills to cope with layoffs caused by the shifting schedules for work gangs. Some went to the fishing, some crofted, some went to those other remarkable centres of rural heavy industry - the slate quarries of Ballachulish, Luing, Balvicar and Easdale, the last of which bucked the notion of small labour forces, being so significant that it boasted the second post office to open in Scotland (some of the Easdale workforce pictured right).

It is shame for the remote and isolated parts of Scotland that their heavy industry is so forgotten. This is just a scraping of the surface, and there is much more to tell. Just think what could be said about the mineral industry in the hills behind Aberfeldy...yet another land which is far, far away.

http://www.machrihanish.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36:argyllcolliery&Itemid=67
http://www.kintyreonrecord.co.uk/articles.php?article_id=72
http://www.easdalemuseum.org/
http://www.celm.org.uk/index.htm (Lismore Museum)