Meet the Sisters

Three of the Five Sisters spoil heaps known as bings in Scotland. These are near West Calder and resulted from shale mining which, along with coal, was the life and soul of ( and reason for) many small villages in central Scotland. Both grandfathers at one time worked in the shale industry. This is 'Paraffin Young's' country. James Young developed the process to extract paraffin in 1851 Roasting shale produced gas, oil, paraffin, naphthaline and sulphur (and I think aspirin could be extracted from the tarry residues but don't quote me). Scotland was once the biggest producer of oil in the world briefly at one time thanks to this industry. The resulting pink waste was then dumped to form these 90 metre mountains.People become attached to their surroundings. When there was talk of removing the Five Sisters apparently there was much public resistance to it. It is now an industrial heritage site.
As a child I found my first fossils splitting lumps of this stuff. Nowadays some folk indulge in a bit of 'bing bagging' which I suppose is where you might start before you look to munros and corbetts. 19 still exist in West Lothian if you want to try one.
The Oakbank bing I also passed today has been deliberately colonised with vegetation. As a biologist I was interested that the initial plants seeded included clovers, lupins and the like -leguminous plants in the pea family that have nodules with bacteria on their roots that allow them to take nitrogen gas from the air and convert it eventually into proteins in the plant. When the plant dies the some of the nitrogen remains to fertilise the soil for other groups of plants. We now have fully grown bushes and trees over it. To think I used to cleave rocks for fossils and have adventures here as a boy. How times change.
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/harvieb/bing.html