IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
King Crescent, WEST CALDER, EH55 8DH

West Calder has an interesting layout, with private houses and allotments coming right up to the back of the supermarket - it's not big enough to have any transitional zones.

This is one of very few legible gravestones in the grounds of the village's former church which was in use from 1643 to 1880. What interested me about this grave was the top two lines which refer to the father of the dead child. First line : THO. JOHNSTON Second line: WRIGHT HERMAND Hermand is an area just South of the village. So either he was double-barrelled, being Mr Johnston-Wright. Or he was called Mr Johnston and was a wright from Hermand! While now only usually found in surnames, at the date of the gravestone it referred to a skilled maker of things, generally out of wood. I assume joiner is a relatively new word as have still to come across a Mr Joiner.

View across the central plaza from beside the town clock, looking towards Scotmid. Somewhere behind the shops is a householder who keeps free-ranging peacocks who can sometimes be seen stalking across the plaza, or even going into Scotmid and nicking bread rolls.

The brick wall behind the new houses must be approaching 20 feet high and its presence is something of a mystery. A large-scale OS map from the late 1950s shows that there was a large building - large enough for it to have definitely not been a house anyway - situated mostly behind where the wall is located. It did, however, have the odd section that jutted out, probably to beyond where the wall is. A wall or fence is shown on the map, but due to the jutty-out bits it was not continuous. At the time of the map the road here had only a couple of buildings on it near its junction with Hartwood Road. It then led to Westmuir Farm. Since then Westmuir Road has been built, which must have about 50 or 60 houses on it. The three houses in the picture, along with another one on Hartwood Road, are built on the land formerly occupied by one house - maybe the new housing development plans so alarmed the owner at the time he deemed the wall necessary?! The houses must have only appeared in the last decade or so, as I do remember the original house still being here not too long ago. The house itself wasn't particularly remarkable - it was what surrounded it that was. The occupant(s) had a collection of strange vehicles parked in the garden and alongside the road - obscure military vehicles and sci-fi looking buggies and so on. On top of this there was a peacock that lived here too, who would often be found wandering round the vicinity with his fine tail on display.

Nobody is ever going to exclaim over West Calder's picturesque beauty, but it's a serviceable village with an interesting roof line. The boarded-up shop front just beyond the silver car used to be a newsagent's, and is now a private house.

Kilt makers. Main Street, West Calder.

Although it felt quite sturdy I thought I had better get a picture of this grave in case it starts to lean even more. It is one of the few readable stones in the grounds of the ruined West Calder Auld Kirk and is written in the usual style, save for getting unusually religious towards the bottom and the fourth line : 'Bain Fewer Blackbwrn'. 'Bain' is simply the surname of one of the couple who are buried here and is a continuation from the previous line. And there is a settlement called Blackburn three to four miles from West Calder, so that takes care of everything apart from 'Fewer'. The history of the letters u, v and w seems a bit complicated, and at various points in history they have been interchangeable in various Germanic languages, of which English is one. It might sound silly, but if you think about it English has all sorts of examples of words that use the same consonant to indicate different sounds - we just get used to 'cell' and 'call' being pronounced differently, and it was obviously the same in earlier times, just with slightly more rules to learn. So did Mr James Bain die of fever in Blackburn, or was he from Little Blackburn (the farm is still standing) which might possibly have also been called 'Fewer Blackburn' back then (my preferred theory), or does it mean something else entirely?!

This monument is all that is left of the Co-Op building on the south side of the street. The Image] commemorates the lives lost in the Burngrange Disaster in 1947.