The Story of Scottish Coal

Coal was such an important part of Scottish life that it was very visible throughout the heavily populated central counties of the Lowland valley, especially around Glasgow and Edinburgh. This photograph was taken by the Reverend Rokeby, a man who set out to take photographs of every railway station in Britain. It shows the two headgear of Bothwell Castle 1 & 2 Colliery, past which millions of people travelled every year in trains to and from Glasgow. It was such a normal and familiar part of the landscape that it became invisible to many people. When the mines began to close in the 1950s, it was not thought possible that coal mining in Scotland could disappear so rapidly.