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Blackmire Terrace, EH55 8FH

I have never seen this before, but obviously it is unlikely to be unique. New houses go hand in hand with new furniture and it's all flat-pack these days. And if you've just spent £150k on a new house, what's £20 to avoid the possibility of kicking to bits your new coffee table when overcome by frustration at your inability to comprehend simple visual instructions that supposedly don't even need to be explained with language, and are understood worldwide by everybody except you?! This is part of a fairly new housing development that is situated close to the site of the former West Calder High School. Bizarrely, this street is called 'Five Sisters View'. The Five Sisters are a prominent landmark in the West Lothian landscape: spoil heaps left over from the very end of the shale-mining industry that was once huge round here. It may be the case that somebody will be able to get a view of them soon from an upstairs window from one of the still to be built houses on the road - there is, however, currently no view of the Five Sisters at all from anywhere on the road.

This tree surrounded field is no longer productive. If developed it will join Polbeth to the growing Livingston. Beyond the stripwood is one of Livingston's industrial estate. View from the former policies of Limefield House, now the grounds of West Calder High School. Taken in driving sleet on a stormy day.

These unsightly high walls have started appearing on a lot of the bridges crossing Scotland's railways in the last few years. A number of bridges have had to be raised recently in order to accommodate the overhead power lines required for the electrification of various routes. I have yet to meet anyone that likes them; they are grey ugly functional-looking things with walls too high to see over - presumably this is to stop teenage tearaways lobbing missiles down onto the passing trains. In this case it looks as if the new walls have simply been attached to the old ones, though it seems a lot of trouble to go to for a bridge that is blocked off by metal gates (the picture was taken through the railings) from a new housing estate close to Polbeth, and leads to a private property, Blackmyre. The bridge has never really gone anywhere, other than to the other side of the railway, and will have been built to allow the farmer at what was once called 'Blackmire' continued access to his fields.

Opened in 1965 and now with a roll of 900 pupils, serving all the Calders area. There is a proposal to relocate the school to an open area at Parkhead in NT0263 http://www.westlothian.gov.uk/west-calder-high-consultation.

Unit on Brucefield Park West.

West Calder High School is in the right foreground. Traces of archaeological dig trenches can be seen in the field in the left foreground.

The remarkably thing about this notice isn't that it escaped the demolition work when the original West Calder High School was pulled down a year or two ago, but that it was still there when it got pulled down. I'd guess it was erected when the original school was built in 1965. It definitely dates from before 1975 though, as that year council boundaries were redrawn all over Scotland - as can just about be seen from the blurry text this used to be Midlothian. In fact East, West and Mid Calder were all originally part of Midlothian. It is interesting to note, from looking at the second rule on the list, that it was a given that it would be a headmaster rather than a headmistress in charge!

Large industrial unit of Instore on the Brucefield Industrial Estate.

This old Calder District Trust milestone is set into the wall on Limefield Road opposite Old School Avenue. There would have been a top portion which is missing. The legend painted on said Edinburgh 15/Lanark 17 according to the 1852 OS 1st Edition map. Milestone Society ID is now WL_EDWS15 (formerly WL_EDLK15 but changed to differentiate from other milestones in the area).