Dovecot Wood

While the tramlines shown to the right of here on the large scale map don't any longer seem to represent anything on the ground, bushes and small trees - some of which are showing at the top right of the picture - occupy the land in the middle of the lines for their entire length. The ground they occupy was part of a road a very long time ago, appearing on late 1700s and early 1800s maps, but no longer in use by the time of the first OS map from the 1850s - by then it is just shown as grass in the middle of two walls or fences. The short grass path is presumably completely unrelated to the old road. It may just be a random coincidence, but may also have been formed by sheep and cattle on their way to get round to the other side of the bushes. The land here is part of a very large untended field in the centre of a circular hard path route. There is a sign when entering the field from the North, warning of the dangers of livestock. I usually find these kinds of signs both bossy and unnecessary (unless warning of the presence of a bull of course). But in this case it is justified. There are often cattle in the field; combine this with the large number of people from nearby Murieston, an area of Livingston, that regularly walk their dogs round the path that circles the field - a lot of whom will not have had that much experience of walking in the country - and you have a potential problem. It must be at least a two minute jog from the centre of the field to the nearest section of path.

This pond is relatively new - maps up until the 1960s just show this spot as being part of a field. A lot of the former farmland is now used for conifer plantations, though, so it is perhaps a result of more focused drainage going on. The drains around here are serious affairs with very steep mud banks, and though one does run near here, it seems to flow into the burn along with the rest of them. The trees in the centre of the picture are actually on a small island, which isn't immediately apparent.

These ruined early- to mid-nineteenth century farm buildings at the foot of Corston Hill appear on the Buildings at Risk Register: see Link

This could, though, be a picture of Bents Burn flowing into Linhouse Water, as Camilty Water changes its name at some point round here, the old house of Linnhous being only a short distance downstream. Or it could even be that the point at which Bents Burn meets the bigger burn is where it changes name, in which case it could be argued that it is flowing into both, or even neither if getting overly philosophical about it! It is an initially confusing convergence as when the smaller burn flows into the bigger one its water carries on in pretty much exactly the same direction. It meets Camilty / Linhouse Water on a right-angled bend. Bents Burn gets its name from a farm situated along its route. There is also a village named Bents (which has now effectively merged with another village, Stoneyburn) a few miles NorthWest of here. Old Scots dictionaries say that 'bent' or 'bents' is a term for rushy grass growing on wet ground, or the area in which it grows, which ties in pretty well with the terrain round these parts.

The tree is rather like the one you get on hazardous chemical warning labels which I think usually have a dead fish somewhere near the tree too, to ram the point home. There are a few middling-sized fields in between the houses at Linhouse (which is spelt differently from map to map) and the railway line just North of here. I presume they are, or were, used for horses, though there was no real evidence around save for a muddy path running across one of the fields which looked like it might have been used for walking horses. It certainly didn't look either sheep or cow related anyhow.

This cute little shooting hut is one of two in a rather disorderly strip of trees to the East of the farm at Bents. Access is from a door at the rear. I often wonder what the shooters shoot in these parts, what with all the fences about, but I read recently that even a two month old deer can usually jump a four foot barbed wire fence. Considering that there are a handful of places in the world where big deer do get ridden, this got me wondering whether deer show jumping has ever been a thing. Nothing on YouTube so far....

I have to confess that my understanding of mediaeval farming methods is pretty poor, but this is probably the first time I am confident enough to say that this is definitely an example of rig (or ridge, as it is called in most of England) and furrow farming. Occasionally OS maps denote it in their old-fashioned Gothic script but I have never before obviously seen it on the ground. (This is a slight concern as it isn't mentioned at this location on any maps!). But apparently it is often more visible at dawn or dusk than in normal daytime hours - this picture was taken about 20 minutes after the sun set. The dark bits of grass are the furrows where the crops would have been grown. From what I can gather from limited online sources early ploughs used to deposit a lot of their churned/tilled soil to the right, and this made the area to the right too difficult to plough due to these newly-formed ridges being too high to plough with any success. So the small ridges got left alone and the early farmers would concentrate on the unaffected land to the right of these ridges. As this happened year after year the rigs (or ridges) got higher and everything became more pronounced. Plus the small-scale mountain/valley topography meant that a lot of water gathered in the furrows, increasing their fertility. It is said that it used to be that individual families would farm individual furrows in mediaeval communities. And that the field systems they created live on when former arable land has turned into grazing land, as is definitely the case here. A furlong, only now ever encountered in horse racing, is 1/8 of a mile, or 220 yards. This is supposedly because a furrow was usually about this length due to 'oxen exhaustion'!

There is a designated access point over the nearby railway

Beside new housing estate on edge of Livingston

Over a small stream/drainage ditch

Beside Murieston Road

Rough grazing in foreground

With lone sheep on right

The building with roof surviving might have been a byre

This shows the position of the Calder District Trust milestone near Skivo behind the safety barrier on the top of the banking down to Murieston Water. It is leaning backwards but it is hoped that eventually it will be reset on the opposite side of the road.

A view of the Calder District Trust milestone within the beech hedge at Broadshaw, 200m east of Harburn Village Hall crossroads.

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