Letham Cottages, rear gardens and green courtyard © Steve Peters (2020/1).They consisted of 3 rows of single story cottages with some dormers built in 1913 around 3 sides of a square with drying greens, rear gardens and a central courtyard. The properties were constructed by the Carron Company to house the miners at the adjacent colliery and the neighbouring William pit located roughly 2 miles east of Letham. Letham had been designated a conversation area in 1978 on the grounds that it represented one of only a few examples of a model industrial village built around a colliery within the Falkirk district in the early 20 th century. I finally visited in May 2020 and it was well worth the wait. Why hadn’t I delved a bit deeper when the settlement had first aroused curiosity? Evan a brief web search and Wikipedia would have revealed that Letham was described as ‘a small former mining village in the Falkirk District’. The archives were shut and even more frustratingly Letham was just too far to count as local exercise. The wander round got pushed to the top of the agenda, but this was March 2020 and lockdown. Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International Licence. Date revised: 1946, Publication date: 1951. Work on the ‘Ash Way’ was temporarily abandoned and the later, and adjacent map, south revealed the full story Letham was a colliery village with the houses and mine manager’s’ house built around the pit, and I had to all extents and purposes ignored it.Įxtract OS Stirlingshire Sheet XXIV.NE (includes: Airth Grangemouth). I had download the wrong historic map and centre top almost off the page was an intriguing colliery site and mineral railway that I knew nothing about.Įxtract OS Stirlingshire nXXIV.7 (Airth Grangemouth Larbert). It was whilst working on the ‘Ash Way’ route for the Coal App which begins and ends in Kincardine on the northern bank of the Forth that eventually both revealed my mistake and Letham’s coal mining history. Looking northwest: the flat and hedgeless landscape of Letham © Steve Peters (2021) Letham Cottages looking south from the A905 © Steve Peters (2021) They piqued my interest, but given that all spare time was taken up with exploring landscape legacies of coal extraction, and my erroneous assumption that they were probably associated with agricultural or the adjacent peat works at Letham Moss, a wander round the village seemed to always get postponed for another day. ![]() They are only just over two and half miles from home, around an hours walk and if wasn’t for my neighbours cherry tree I could probably see them from the bedroom windows. ![]() ![]() ‘Hedgeless fields and uninterrupted views across flat landscape…’ For some 12 years now, one way or the other, I have passed them by on my way to and from work. Located in a setting described by Jacques in his architectural guide to Falkirk and District ‘as Dutch or East Anglian in character…’. The white rows of Letham, (Greater Falkirk) stand proud on the carse lands south of the River Forth, visible from both the M876 and the A905.
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