ADDIEWELL ULURU
To walk towards the Five Sisters on a long summer’s afternoon is to feel the landscape rearranging itself around you. They are not mountains, not in the geological sense. They are bings: vast, man-made mounds of spent oil shale, the industrial relics of West Lothian’s past. Yet as the sun lowers, slanting its light across the Central Belt, they assume a monumental quality. Their rust-red flanks glow with an intensity that seems to belong to another continent, another kind of stone.
I begin the short, sharp climb up the westernmost sister. The ground under my boots is a scrabble of brick-coloured fragments, bingshale, that crunches and shifts with each step. The material is warm to the touch, having held the day’s heat. Sparse grasses and hardy wildflowers, colonists of this strange new substrate, push up between the shards. From the summit, the view is a map of intersecting times: the ancient line of the Pentland Hills to the east, the drone of the M8 motorway to the north, and all around, the quiet reclamation of this place by birch and buddleia.
It is the colour, above all, that prompts the comparison, that sends the mind spinning 10,000 miles south. This is the terracotta glow of the Australian heartlands, the colour of Uluru at dusk. Both are monoliths that command their plain, drawing the eye and shaping the horizon. Uluru is a single, sacred stone, an inselberg of arkose sandstone that speaks of deep time, of Dreamtime, its iron-rich minerals slowly rusting over millennia. The Five Sisters are its uncanny echo, terraliths of the Anthropocene. Their iron was locked away in the dark of the earth for 340 million years, until it was brought to the surface, cooked, and dumped here a century ago, left to oxidise in the Scottish rain.
Uluru is a place of profound stillness and ancient story. The tales of the Anangu people are sung into its every cleft and waterhole. The story of the bings is younger, harsher. It is a story of extraction, of hard labour in the dark, of communities built and then broken on the promise of what lay in the underland. Yet to stand here now is to feel a new kind of story being written. This is no longer just a spoil heap; it has become a habitat, a landmark, a place of pilgrimage for walkers and wonderers.
One is a sacred natural creation; the other, a profane industrial residue. But on a summer’s afternoon, as the light catches their shared redness, they seem for a moment to be two expressions of the same planetary process. Both are monuments, one to the slow, patient artistry of the earth, the other to the furious, fleeting alchemy of humankind. And both ask the same question of those who stand before them: what are the stories this land tells, and how do we learn to read them?