Roslin Bing.

The theme for today’s WidWed challenge is “History,” an unlikely topic. I’ve done my three score years and ten on this planet so have seen a fair amount of history; the Earth, on the other hand, has been here for six thousand years according to some, or four and a half billion if you believe others, both numbers are too large for me to get my head around. The consequence is, that where-ever I point my camera, I will be capturing either the relics of history, or history being created.
 
This particular relic was one of Jnr’s favourite places for tobogganing in the winter while, in the summer, we hunted here for fossils. We did find one once, it looked like some species of plant which was not surprising, bearing in mind the location, though we were unable to  get it identified in spite of taking it to the science festival. We also looked for bricks with Roslin printed on them. 


For those of you unfamiliar with the Scottish vernacular, a bing is a spoil heap of mining waste (from the Norse meaning – wait for it – a heap) and this particular bing was associated with the coal mine here; in fact, I probably stood just where the pithead was to take the Blip. In our tobogganing days, this area was fenced off with dire warnings of what might happen to anyone brave enough to scale the fence. I don’t suppose the mine shafts were deep, not for mine shafts, but falling down one would definitely have done you an “oooh nasty.”
 
To the right of here, was the brick kiln which was recent enough for me to remember going inside to explore, but not recently enough for me to remember what was inside – or maybe – it just wasn’t sufficiently interesting. Anyway, the bing was dug up and, apparently, removed for hard-core in the road construction industry – though probably just too late to be used on the Edinburgh bypass – and the area left to re-wild and become a sort of nature reserve.
As a foot note, Wikipedia claims that the road shouldn’t be classed as a bypass since there is no reason for anyone to go into Edinburgh anyway!
 
Thanks to Steveng for hosting this week’s challenge, and - 

I've just posted yesterday's, "Joppa Beach."