Mungle Street, West Calder

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 27 Sep 2021

This is one of those great little jumbled-up streets that are often to be found just off the main roads of old towns, though whether West Calder can still lay claim to being a town is debatable. It certainly was a town a generation or two ago, and though it probably actually now has more houses than it did back then, the ever-reducing number of shops and pubs might have relegated it to village status - I'm not sure that hairdressers and takeaways have the same clout. There is a mixture of old and new housing, rear access to surprisingly long backs of a couple of buildings on Main Street, and a few odd old outbuildings from the past, such as these two at No 2 (there is also a third off camera, attached to the brick one on the right). The dead-end road isn't shown on the 1850s OS map, but it is marked as Mungle Street on the next one, surveyed in 1895. It seems likely that it takes its name from the Mungle family, who for two or three generations by the looks of it, ran a general store and the bank in West Calder. If this is the case it does seem a bit odd though, as these were both still being managed by the family in 1895. The question is: were they thought of that highly, was somebody currying favour, or did they think of themselves that highly?! I found a story concerning the shop, which used to sit opposite Cleuch Brae (the road leading under the railway bridge), on the Facebook page of an always reliable local history group. In the 1870s somebody was arguing with the whoever was serving in the shop. The argument resulted in them throwing some gunpowder (which was often sold over the counter as miners were required to bring their own explosives to work) on the fire in the shop. There was an explosion, the windows blew out, and somebody (not a Mungle) caught fire and later died.

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