35 Bing

This is the name of a search engine I’m using, but also Scots for a slag heap, a mound of (sometimes hot) waste, dug out of the ground during mining. There are many near Edinburgh. I fashioned a story that included one… The Quiet Hill https://youtu.be/aXxu5Qttr2s The bing was closed to the public when I went to film. It had caught fire again 40 years later! Old bings never die. There’s a joke there somewhere.

They are often an unusual shape. Probably because they are man-made, and cast a particular shadow on the landscape. I have a beautiful book about them Terrils : Naoya Hatakeyama

The Five Sisters are nice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmABCUyR2Iw

…with gradients useful for performance poets https://youtu.be/Y9TrPYEqxas

My grandfather lived in darkest Fife, Cardenden, and was a miner all of his life. The village arrived with coal mining and disappeared with it also. It took about 150 years. It is an incredibly interesting history, pretty much ending with the fight between the miners and Margaret Thatcher. A hated figure in these communities. Joe Corrie - the miner playwright - was from here https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/joe-corrie/ Fun fact The woods adjacent to Cardenden are known as Cardenden Den.

One of the UKs great social historians, Tony Parker (amazing books), wrote Red Hill, the story of Horden, a mining town devastated by pit closures in the mid-1980s. I was inspired to go on holiday there to find out more. I may have been the only tourist they had seen for a while. Horden is also famous for (another reason I went) the closing scene in Mike Hodges 1971 film Get Carter with Michael Caine. He said he wanted to film on the ruined beach because it had a close vision of hell. It has been beautified since with European money. Bit of a shame.

One of the great landmarks (well two actually) near me was Cockenzie Power Station. Demolished in 2015 and sadly missed, it was a last coal-fired power station from this once great mining nation. I have a bag of white stones collected from the rubble after the chimneys came down, and am still considering a suitable epitaph. I have to admit though, wind turbines look better.