IN carrying out research for a video looking at the Fife Pilgrim Way, Glasgow, I discovered the true extent of Fife's coal-mining industry, and how it very much shaped the whole area.

This was an industry I knew nothing about. I knew we had a coal-mining industry, but I didn't know just how extensive it was and how it very much shaped the whole of Fife.

In looking at the countryside between Dunfermline and Lochore, which was the walking route in the video, you would never know that from the late nineteenth century right up to the 1960s the whole landscape was dotted with collieries and their many pits.

Whole villages grew up from miners' rows of cottages. Some of these villages, like Fairfield and Lassodie, were abandoned and demolished in the 1930s, while others, like Lochore, still exists today.

In the mid-nineteenth century Lochore did not exist, and it was only because of the digging of a number of coal pits in the area that the village slowly grew to the small town it is today.'

I found the whole thing more than a little bit sad, and at times unbelievable. Villages like Fairfield and Lochore grew to provide men to work at Lassodie Colliery. When that pit closed in 1931 you suddenly had a lot of miners out of work, but also their families were then evicted from their homes.'

In putting the video together, I was inspired to write a song about coal mining, which he then used at the end of the video, and placed it on Youtube:

https://youtu.be/fvoUA50LmPs

The whole thing has been a real eye-opener. What happened to all these miners? Where did they go, and how did they and their families survive? I'd like to think in creating this video I've allowed people to get a small glimpse of this part of Fife, and how we have lost so much. The video is titled, 'Fife Pilgrim Way - Day Three,' and the song at the end of the video is called, 'Where Have They All Gone?'

EDWARD BURNS,

Glasgow.