Oil Shale Bing 'hing

These monuments to West Lothian's boom time are all over the place.

I had to chuckle at this early documented poke at Edinburgh by H.M. Caddell in his 1925 publication The Rocks of West Lothian...

From 1883 to 1923 ...the total quantity of spent shale comes to 116,800,000 cubic yards. This large figure will, no doubt, convey little or no meaning to ordinary readers, but if we imagine the material to be all collected into one vast heap, its size can be more easily appreciated.

Let us suppose some titanic magician could sweep up all the shale bings and place them on an equally titanic carpet, then lift it by the four corners and fly with the bundle to the neighbourhood of Arthur's Seat.

To demonstrate to the intellectuals of Edinburgh the bulk of the aerial cargo, he might hover over the New Town, pierce the bag and let the shale stream out, as sand streams through the neck of an hourglass. It would form a cone with sides sloping at 40 degrees and the base would reach from the middle of Charlotte Square to the Melville Monument in St Andrews Square, while the top would rise to a height of 1285 ft above George Street, and would be almost level with the crest of Allermiur on the Pentlands.

If this were considered too frightful a piece of vandalism to inflict on Scotia's darling seat, our magician might fly seawards and drop the ashes on the foreshore at Portobello, where they would produce a cone 1½ times as high as the ancient volcano of Arthur's Seat.