page_title: West Lothian
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: West Lothian / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Shale bing, Niddry. The eastern end of this shale bing stretches into the square, which also contains: some arable land, a small wood and the M9. View north from NT102741. The shale is baked oilshales, the remnants after the oil has been removed.
context_page_description: West Lothian is one of the 32 council areas of Scotland, and one of its historic counties. The county, which was also known as Linlithgowshire, was bounded geographically by the Avon to the west and the Almond to the east. The modern council area occupies a larger area, with areas in the west transferred to Falkirk and areas in the east transferred to Edinburgh following local government reforms in the late 20th century. It did however gain areas from Midlothian.
  West Lothian lies on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth and is predominantly rural, though there were extensive coal, iron, and shale oil mining operations in the 19th and 20th centuries, which created distinctive red spoil heaps throughout the council area. The old county town was the royal burgh of Linlithgow, but the largest town is now Livingston.
context_section_description: West Lothian was extensively settled in prehistoric times, and several ancient burial sites have been uncovered, such as at Cairnpapple Hill. There are remains of hillforts on Cockleroy, Peace Knowe, Bowden, Cairnpapple, and Binns Hills. The area was anciently inhabited by Britons of the tribe known as the Votadini or Gododdin. By 83 AD, southern Scotland had been conquered by Romans, who built a road from their fort at Cramond to the eastern end of the Antonine Wall, as well as forts in West Lothian (of which Castle Greg is a known example). The Romans withdrew roughly two centuries later, and the area was left to the Britons until the arrival of Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries, who brought Lothian under the rule of the Kingdom of Northumbria. In later centuries the region was regularly overrun by Gaelic-speaking Scots, and it became permanently part of the Kingdom of Scotland in the 11th century.
  Scotland was split into sheriffdoms, what would later become counties, in the reign of David I. The first known reference to a sheriff of Linlithgow occurs in a charter dating from the reign of his successor Malcolm IV. For a time West Lothian became a constabulary, but it seems to have been made a sheriffdom again during the reign of James III.
  In pre-industrial times West Lothian was almost entirely agricultural. In the way of heavy industry there was a silver mine at Cairnpapple, a cotton mill at Blackburn, paper mills at Linlithgow, and shallow coal mines around Bathgate and Whitburn. The county was radically changed by the Industrial Revolution,(from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840) with the opening of deep-pit iron, coal, and shale oil mines, as well as foundries and brickworks. Many of the houses built for the expanding population were shoddy, necessitating the building of thousands of council houses in the latter part of the 20th century, especially at Livingston, which had historically been a minor village. The bings produced by the mining industry, 19 of which still stand in West Lothian, were at first considered blights, but now are thought of as monuments to Scotland's industrial past, and a representation of one appears on the council's coat of arms. Heavy industry declined after the Second World War, and the last shale oil mine closed in 1962.
caption: Niddry bing
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