Briestonhill Moss

A railway line used to run here from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, transporting shale mined at Mid Breich Pits nos 1 and 2, a few hundred yards North of here, to Westwood Oil Works, a few hundred yards South. The short railway line ran under the road at this point according to contemporary OS maps. The tunnel is essentially just a bricked-up bridge, with a square hole cut into one of the bricked-up ends for no obvious reason. The bottles and odd bits of rubbish must have washed in through the hole during heavy rain; nobody would come here for fun, however desperate - the rain has also washed in a great deal of sludgy mud. It is quite hard to make out in the picture - mobile phones still don't come close to proper cameras when using the flash - but there is a narrow opening after the lit-up section of wall on the right. This gives access to an identical tunnel, so presumably there were actually two tracks running between the pits and the oil works - the empties probably got sent back on a separate track. Both tunnels are around five and a half feet high and wide, and thirty-odd feet long - the other one is fully blocked off.

There are two of these signs heading East out of West Calder on the A71. Having never seen them anywhere else I assumed they were the work of a particularly irritated individual or group of people. This may well actually be the case, but if so they have obviously been done with council approval. Driving past them I assumed, completely wrongly, that they were home-made affairs, done on thick card and tie-banded to the posts. In fact they are professionally done on metal plates and affixed to the posts by proper-fitting metal clasps. The clown is rather menacing up close, reminiscent of something you'd come across in a 1980s horror film!

This is one of those great little jumbled-up streets that are often to be found just off the main roads of old towns, though whether West Calder can still lay claim to being a town is debatable. It certainly was a town a generation or two ago, and though it probably actually now has more houses than it did back then, the ever-reducing number of shops and pubs might have relegated it to village status - I'm not sure that hairdressers and takeaways have the same clout. There is a mixture of old and new housing, rear access to surprisingly long backs of a couple of buildings on Main Street, and a few odd old outbuildings from the past, such as these two at No 2 (there is also a third off camera, attached to the brick one on the right). The dead-end road isn't shown on the 1850s OS map, but it is marked as Mungle Street on the next one, surveyed in 1895. It seems likely that it takes its name from the Mungle family, who for two or three generations by the looks of it, ran a general store and the bank in West Calder. If this is the case it does seem a bit odd though, as these were both still being managed by the family in 1895. The question is: were they thought of that highly, was somebody currying favour, or did they think of themselves that highly?! I found a story concerning the shop, which used to sit opposite Cleuch Brae (the road leading under the railway bridge), on the Facebook page of an always reliable local history group. In the 1870s somebody was arguing with the whoever was serving in the shop. The argument resulted in them throwing some gunpowder (which was often sold over the counter as miners were required to bring their own explosives to work) on the fire in the shop. There was an explosion, the windows blew out, and somebody (not a Mungle) caught fire and later died.

On the line from Glasgow Central to Edinburgh Waverley via Shotts.

Waste from the oil shale industry.

Off the B792.

Towards Polbeth. New housing being built on the left.

Towards the Five Sisters Bing.

Junction with Polbeth Road.

Towards Livingston.

Towards Fauldhouse.

Off the B7015.