Scottish Industry

[my comments].

From: A GUIDE TO THE INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE OF CENTRAL SCOTLAND by JOHN CROMPTON (Curator of Engineering and Industry at the National Museums of Scotland, and Chair of the Scottish Industrial Heritage Society.) Published to mark the Annual Conference of the Association for Industrial Archaeology, held at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 6-12 September 2002.

So crucial to the national economy were coal mining and salt production that miners and salters were owned as slaves until 1799.

Mining reached a peak in 1913, much produced by major combines such as the Fife Coal and the Lothian Coal Companies. After 1948 the National Coal Board [part of Britian's grand experiment in central planning] embarked on a massive development scheme of new sinkings, most of which failed spectacularly. By 1984 there were few active pits in central Scotland and deep mining ceased in April 2002 with the closure [after flooding] of Longannet Colliery. [curiously, during a labor dispute]

Lowland agricultural improvements are expressed in large steadings

Domestic textile manufacture, based on wool and flax, was endemic across Scotland and fulling was being mechanised in the Borders by the late-14th century. The arrival of the new cotton fibre in the 1780s transformed the industries of the Clyde valley, although only one of the four great water-powered cotton villages, New Lanark, is there; the others were at Catrine on the River Ayr, Deanston on the Teith and at Stanley on the Tay. Linen manufacture, once widespread, was concentrated in Fife and on Tayside, lacemaking at Newmilns and Darvel in the Irvine valley. Woollens, both woven and knitted, retained their superiority in the islands and the Borders, the latter as important for machine knitwear as for cloth bearing the generic name Tweed'. Another new fibre, jute, came to Dundee in the 1830s, and the city came to control the industry in Bengal as well as in Tayside. The demands of the textile industry encouraged the first large scale production of sulphuric acid by John Roebuck at Prestonpans (1749) and of bleaching powder by Charles Tennant at St Rollox, Glasgow in 1799. In the early 19th century Scotland's chemical industry led the world.

Scotland's iron industry has been another contributor to world fame. The Scottish Bloomeries Project has identified many highland ironmaking sites, and English ironmasters found new sources of charcoal on west coast sites in the mid c18th. Scotland's first coke smelting works, 'on the Coalbrookdale principle' and at the same time Scotland's first large joint-stock company, was the Carron Company, established by Roebuck, Garbett and Cadell in 1759 and going into blast in December 1760; in 1767 John Smeaton designed new waterwheels and blowing cylinders. Other works followed slowly at first, Wilsontown in 1779. ten by 1810, but the great period of expansion followed the introduction of J B Neilson's hot blast in 1828 which, with the suitability of local blackband ores, made Scotland a major pig iron producer with 128 furnaces providing 1.15 million tons in 1869.

The move to steel began c1880; in 1892, 93 open-hearth furnaces produced 462,000 tons and in 1900 the output was 960,000 tons. Iron smelting ceased at Carron only in 1981, and bulk steel making with the closure of Ravenscraig in 1992.

[The vast majority of these industrial sites and the railroads that served them were not only closed, but demolished by the end of the twentieth century, to clearly tell the working class that their services were no longer required.]