Guthrie Hutton Ordre des livres (chronologique)

Mining expert Guthrie Hutton is the author of this compact overview of the Scottish coal industry in our old towns/industries format. Besides the well-known and remembered Lanarkshire, Fife, Lothian, Central and Ayrshire coalfields, the black stuff was got out of the ground at various minor unlikely locations - Brora in Sutherland, Rowanburn in Dumfriesshire, Dalquharran in the Girvan Valley and the Argyll Colliery at the southern end of the Kintyre Peninsula. These sites are featured as are better-known ones such as Barony, Killoch, Highouse, Minnivey, Coalburn, Farme, Bedlay, Banknock, Millhall, Kinneil, Kelty, Glencraig, Bowhill, Rothes and Arniston. The book also deals with aspects of mining life such as disasters, housing, pipe bands, miners' welfare homes and strikes.

In the late eighteenth century, Scottish men of commerce envisioned goods moving easily from sea to sea and city to city. Instead of being carted at a snail's pace on rough unmade roads in tiny quantities, wheat, sugar, salt and more would move in bulk and at speed. So the Forth & Clyde Canal was born, with profit as its motive and Glasgow as its focus. Later, the Union Canal was constructed, completing the network by providing a link from Edinburgh to the Forth & Clyde Canal at Falkirk. But the Great War closed the ports on the Forth, and afterwards metalled roads and powerful lorries killed the canals commercially. By the mid-1960s both were closed but now, after over thirty years of campaigning and an ambitious £78 million Millennium Lottery Fund application, Scotland's Millennium Canals have been reborn, with the Falkirk Wheel, a giant rotating boat-lift, as their centrepiece. This lovely books tells that story.