We have previously (RR 98/333) reviewed some of this enterprising local publisher’s titles recording in print Scotland’s industrial and social history. In so many respects they are recalling and illustrating lost glories: especially of an industrial and mining base and the transport infrastructure which grew up to service it. Coal mining was once at the heart of that industry across the whole of Central Scotland and this latest volume by Guthrie Hutton surveys the industry in the Lothians surrounding Edinburgh. Unlike many of this firm’s titles (and certainly all the others reviewed here), while original photographs abound throughout, the text is more substantial than just expanded captions. Thus both a written and visual history are well captured in an A4 format (all the other volumes reviewed here are landscape).
The Caledonian Canal runs from sea to sea (beginning in Loch Ness in the North East) through the Great Glen and is recorded here in the usual style of this series with reproductions of a generous size of photographs showing views and boats, and with a brief introduction and informative if fairly concise captions. The Forth and Clyde Canal (between Glasgow and Edinburgh) is celebrated in an identical style with plenty of views of the canal itself and of its setting and structures within the towns through which it passes; the canal itself has achieved a remarkable renaissance in recent times from the largely derelict to the largely restored, and is now set to become a notable leisure and tourist attraction. The early photographs reproduced here remind us of its former commercial use.
The railway was, of course, for much of this century the pre‐eminent mode of travel for both passengers and freight, both long distance and local. From the 1950s a savage reduction in branch lines reduced the network to its present truncated form, so that volumes such as these are invaluable to remind us what has been lost, and explain some remaining landscape features which are now often just isolated curiosities (in my own village the only relics of a branch line closed more than 30 years ago are a rubbish tip on the site of the old station and the road to it still named Station Brae). The Kingdom of Fife’s former industries were served by a network of once flourishing railways, now reduced to the extent of almost marooning St Andrews, except for a tedious road journey or strange rail/bus connection at a nearby air base (surely the key to the sketch map in this volume has the “open” and “closed” lines reversed?). The railways of Dumfries and Galloway are especially romantic, for the scenery they ran through (and still in some instances enhance), and particularly for those of us who enjoyed Dorothy Sayers’Five Red Herrings which used the local railways as an integral part of her complex plot. All is evocatively conveyed in both volumes with period photographs of stations,locomotives, trains and, above all, people, from the beginning of the century to the 1950s. All these volumes add to a now widespread and thoroughly worthwhile series of titles recording Scotland’s local history and its civic, industrial and social heritage.
