Pond by Cycle-Path in Wester Inch

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 16 Jul 2021

This is one of two adjacent ponds just off National Cycle Route 75 (which runs from Edinburgh to the West Coast via Glasgow) at this spot, in the Wester Inch area of Bathgate. Wester Inch seems to have been permanently expanding over the last ten to fifteen years or so, and is centred on the site of a former British Leyland factory which itself was pretty huge, judging by old pictures. It operated for 25 years from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s and produced lorries and tractors. There is a claim buried somewhere online, that it once housed the greatest number of machine tools under one roof in all of Europe, though how exactly anyone could ever verify such a statement is unclear! The long road that runs from one side to the other is called Leyland Road in a nod to the past. While a perfectly pleasant residential area it will, to my mind, be hampered in the future by a lack of easily accessible amenities. Although older developments like this aren't as pretty to our modern eyes they do all at least have shops and so on scattered throughout their full area, as opposed to the modern way, which is just to lump the bare minimum of stuff deemed necessary in one fairly soulless central square, a good distance away from a lot of the residents.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0