The crunchy gravel on the path under my feet used to have railway tracks on it. It’s been flattened now, the sleepers and rails torn up to make way for cyclists and walkers. This was never a commercial railway – it was a coal-board owned one. I wonder how many thousands or millions of tonnes of coal sped their way up and down it when it did exist: coal for industry, coal for families, coal for war, coal for pollution, and atoms for peace.
The pathway is picturesque now, the wilderness cleaved back from it’s edges to reveal the rolling countryside around it. Farms and glades that feel inviting and homely, it’s odd to see them from this perspective as my childhood memories show them from different angles. The path is also strewn intermittently with small signs, some of these provide history on the railroad, others point to entrances to the mining villages the trains that rumbled up and down this track would have picked up their loads from.
The bridges, walls and other man made features are neglected, deep green moss and flowers grow from their cracked surfaces lending an ethereal quality to my journey. One bridge in particular evokes a strong memory, it is high and long – crossing a deep natural ravine. I stop for a while and look into the forest from the bridge, eventually I look down – it must be 80-90 feet high. When I was younger, I got really drunk one night and decided to walk along this very same path to sober myself up, I’d come to this bridge and decided to walk down the steep edge of the ravine and see what was underneath.
This turned out to be nothing, but I remember standing at the bottom at around four am with the burn trickling past me and the pale dawn breaking open the sky above; god, this must have been what, eleven or twelve years ago now? I’d gone under the bridge, sat down and fallen asleep. When I awoke, I was no longer under the bridge but was lying next to the sea wall in Culross, new dawn fully upon me, the keen, nippy Western wind blowing across the Forth chilling my face. I still don’t know how I got there, sleepwalk or blackout, one or the other…
This bridge is also important because it signals that I am near the end of my journey. The path runs for around seventeen miles in total, there is an entrance to it a couple of minutes walk from my mother’s house. My destination leaves the path around eight miles after it’s beginning and I veer off onto a country road. Where the path joins this road is near my Grandmother’s house but this is not the purpose of my journey. It has been years since I have traversed this path, but I remember every twist and turn of it so well I could still navigate it with my eyes closed, I’m glad I don’t have to do this as I am met with a surprising sight upon rounding a bend…
As is common in Fife, there are coal-bings scattered arbitrarily around the countryside near the mining towns; large slag heaps made of dry dirt and shale, the waste products of labour, like cairns to a dead industry marking where the pits that produced them used to be. The bings are ugly black marks that ruin the view and serve as little more than a reminder of a time when the means to produce energy was less clean.
This has changed.
The bing I remember as an ugly blackish-red hillock from my childhood is covered in vegetation, weeds, trees, and flowers. I am amazed that life has managed to cling and blossom in the loose stony earth, the bing now looks like a natural part of the landscape, unnoticeable save for the gate and fencing at it’s foot reminding people to keep off it due to the loose shifting soil. It looks solid – no real danger in climbing it now I suppose?
I consider this for a moment but remember the bunch of flowers in my hand – the real purpose of my journey – and see the other hill and winding path I have to climb in the distance, the cemetery at it’s summit. No time for this now.
I walk on down the road, conflicted and unbalanced by the revelation of the pile of shale I’ve just left, proof that no matter how difficult the condition, life will find a way. This gives little comfort as I ease down the road, not wanting to face what I have to face when I reach the top of the hill.
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