Last week we walked along beautiful beaches from Cove to North of Berwickin Scotland, sand rippled with coal dust,and piled with driftwood and bones of gannets from the great gannetry of bass rock.
(Many were dark feathered – flightless fledglings who plunge into the sea and have a dangerous swim of it for the first two weeks of their migration)
But also rusting machinery – one looked like an airplane undercarriage; another had four wheels still connected on an axle, perhaps from a narrow gauge train?
That l liked and wanted to take home to grow pinks and sea holly around it (but practically difficult with the rust and moving parts). It was only when we stopped at the National coal mining museum near Barnsley on the way back to Hull ferry that I could identify these machines as the bones of abandoned coal mines, the set of wheels I fancied was from a truck that carries the coal up out of the mines.
I tried to find out more but I found only this excellent essay, A Sense of time in the Fife Coalfields on the sea and the abandoned mines of
The Author tells of the collapse of land and beach in Fife as the land settles and shifts into its abandoned mines, of signs reading ’ beware road subsiding ‘- of a mine closed in 1972, but still being pumped to prevent flooding of the surrounding land.
He says ‘trash rock that came out of the active mine was dumped straight onto the coast.’
All along the beaches too you could see lumps of old brick structures deposited, presumably from the coalmines, and forming part of the sea defences now. An old lime kiln stood just down from the cement works.
I carelessly, thought to take no pictures of the jetsam, so this is Tourness nuclear power station, always in sight, wherever we walked.
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