The Lade Library.
I was born in Stirling in 1956 & spent much of my life on my Grandparents' farmhouse, on the field of Bannockburn at Millhall. My Mother's Father was Pit foreman at Polmaise 1 & 2, a coalmine just opposite the house & though it stopped production in the early sixties, I spent many happy years exploring & rummaging among the abandoned buildings, winding gear, railway cuttings, rapidly re-foliating spoil heaps & defunct office blocks full of old files & leatherbound ledgers. A lade ran past the house, supplying the pit with water from the Bannock, while nearby the Pelstream Burn powered a grain mill which dated back some 500 years.
The house itself, being of a considerable age, was full of treasures also; a stone-floored dairy stocked—mysteriously—with a collection of hand-wrought lead crystal shepherd's crooks & a rusted 1314 caltrop unearthed from the garden, two pianos, a hand-operated "washing machine" & wringer, & best of all, a library of sorts in one of the attic rooms. Behind the glass doors of an old wooden bookcase were kept an intriguing array of dusty volumes. Here could be found an almost complete set of "The Harmsworth Self-Educators", "Lost Horizon", ghost stories by M.R. James, "First Stage Heat Engines" & "Mining Regulations-1948", "The Home Doctor", "101 things for a Boy to Make & Do", a four volume set on the life & works of Rabbie Burns. Bibles & Dictionaries with missing covers & ruined spines held together with brittle, yellowed & cracking sellotape. An early "Penguin" edition of "Roget's Thesaurus". "I, Jan Cremer" & John Fowles' "The Magus". Henry Miller's "Sexus", "Nexus" & "Plexus". "Paradise Lost" & numerous bound scores, libretti & piano transcriptions of various operettas & musicals including "My Lucky Valentine", "Brigadoon" & "The White Horse Inn". Bram Stoker's "Dracula"...
Occasionally, on my Saturday walk across the fields to Stirling, I would augment this collection with my own purchases. Sci-Fi mainly but also tiny 2/6d volumes from Methuen's "Little Library of Art", or, "How to paint Clouds in Watercolour", & once, a hardback life of Van Gogh, illustrated with colour plates.
In the 80's when I spent an increasing amount of time there—drawing inspiration from the house & area in my art—I started to incorporate these books in paintings & drawings. The nearby spoil-heap, or "Bing" had always loomed large in my consciousness, whether as a sulphurous adventure playground or as a spontaneously combusting beacon at night, & my initial efforts with these old books seemed to echo it's volcanic, lofty peak. Later I would develop them into arches, columns & leaning towers.
When we left the house for good in '89, for years I would find myself recreating the circumstances of these "Books" paintings. While I kept the bookcase & many of it's contents, I would find myself trawling junk shops from Partick to Doune, being ludicrously overcharged for particularly decrepit old volumes, with which I could transport myself back to this Attic.
Even now I sometimes find myself returning to that most arcane of websites, "Scottish Mining" & immersing myself in events recorded therein, of deaths & injuries, so many fathoms below ground, over the pit's 60-odd functioning years. When walking the now tree-lined route of the Old Polmaise junction, I like to imagine the endless miles of tunnels still there, deep below my feet, forever denied the Moon's beams-- unlit by oil- lamps, sealed off from the Sun & air-gapped by time.
Now, Millhall "Bing" itself-much reduced for landfill- is the opposite of what it once was, being more sylvan crater than infernal peak & what's left of the pit buildings have long been incorporated into a livestock market.
Recently two of my adventurous sisters have been exploring it's interior & perhaps taking their cue from a Long or a Goldsworthy have been constructing a cairn of igneous rocks somewhere in it's centre, tucked away amidst the ash & birch. "Dumyat", a hill visible to the North in the Ochils has a Measurement Point atop it built long ago by our surveyor uncle for the coal board & I like to think of this "reverse cairn" of theirs as it's counterpoint, an Anti-Trigonometric point.
One day, on one of my walks among lades, glades & disused railways, I might even stumble across it.
