Livingston, Westwood Shale-oil Works, Five Sisters Bing

ADDIEWELL, from 1865

Paraffin Young's largest oil works. Shale oil communities characteristically took the form of long, low, single-storey, brick cottages, placed at random in unlikely rural locations - like Faraday Place, c.1890. Addiewell has no real centre, unless you count its crowstepped farm, 1762. St Thomas RC Church, 1923, by Reginald Fairlie, sitting high and harled on its raised site, has a baroque gable with niche for a statue at the apex. Priest's house with pyramid roof adjoins. The most eye-catching feature of Addiewell is the Five Sisters shale bing, the most predominant surviving symbol of the oil industry. Meadowhead House, 1899, by J G Fairley, is an impressive three-storey baronial tower grafted upon an Improvement farmhouse.

Taken from "West Lothian: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Stuart Eydmann, Richard Jaques and Charles McKean, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk

NT06SW 22.01 009 640

Westwood Oil Works, Five Sisters shale bing. The monument consists of a substantial shale bing, the evidence of former extraction and processing of oil-shale.

(Undated) information in NMRS.

(Location cited as NT 010 640 and name as West Calder). Spectacular shale-oil bing of conical type.

J R Hume 1976.

NT 009 640 A proposal for the redevelopment of the former shale-oil works led to an archaeological survey in June 2003. Twenty features of industrial archaeological interest were recorded. These included the Scheduled Five Sisters bing (NT06SW 22.01) and factory buildings (e.g. works laboratory, locomotive shed and stores, the foreman's office and the former Westwood Mine offices and workshops). The industrial development of the site is likely to have erased any older archaeological remains.

Report lodged with West Lothian SMR.

Sponsor: Watson Construction Group.

M Cressey 2004