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SHALE
VOICES
by Alistair Findlay |
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| INDEX |
From local legend, newspaper reports and family history, Alistair Findlay has pieced together a comprehensive documentary of Scotland's shale mining industry; of the people, communities and generations of families involved, and the cultural and political impact of the industry. Enlivened throughout with numerous photographs, drawings, poetry and short stories, this incredible history of human courage, endurance and endeavour will appeal to any reader with an interest in Scotland's social and cultural history.
HEARING THE VOICES Introduction to Shale Voices:
‘While pilots talk to air traffic control the shale bings speak of West Lothian’s soul’ When Alistair Findlay’s Shale Voices was published by Luath Press in 1999, it became immediately the most comprehensive and authoritative source for the history of shale mining in West Lothian. Taken in combination with the excellent exhibition at the Almond Valley Heritage Centre in Livingston Village, it tells the story of a crucial and formative era in local history. However, it is much more than that. The importance of Shale Voices for local people, and especially school pupils, is that it captures the authentic voice of West Lothian in an era that is on the edge of being out of reach. Here, faithfully recorded, are individual memories, conversations, newspaper articles, short stories, poems and factual accounts that don’t merely record the provenance of those strange alien pink mountains on our landscape, but evoke the lives of the people who produced them, and who, in so doing, for a brief period, made this part of the Lothians ‘the oil capital of the world’. It is a time that will already seem strange to our twenty first century children – when their home place appears to have been lodged somewhere between Houston in Texas and the Wild West, while still retaining its own unique brand of ‘east meets west’ central Scotland. In its pages they can find, in many cases, the authentic voices of their ancestors or their neighbours. For others, incomers from other parts of the country or furth of Scotland, it will be a partial explanation of how their adopted home came to be the way it is today. In providing this Teaching Ideas Booklet, we hope to encourage teachers and their pupils to dip into Shale Voices, to use it as the source book it is, but also to use it as a springboard to new writing, study and research; to put into practice the wise dictum that only through understanding the past can we confidently shape our future. What follows are not lesson plans – each teacher knows best the needs of their class. However, hopefully, the ideas suggested to various departments in the following pages will instigate an examination of all that the book offers and a body of work that not only fits in tidily with ‘A Curriculum for Excellence’ but also provides local, social and historical relevance to pupils’ studies at all stages in primary and secondary. There is a rich seam of material to be mined – let these pages serve as the miners’ lamps!!!! Sean McPartlin
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 Shale Voices 2007 edition |
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