Our Frozen Landscape #1

This is West Lothian. The hills you see in the distance are named the Five Sisters and are man made. They are an iconic landmark - a reminder of the days when oil was extracted from local rock known as shale and long before crude oil began being pumped directly from the ground in the US and Middle East.

Lying abandoned since 1962, the five hills (or bing) serve as a reminder of the oil shale industry pioneered in 1858 by James 'Paraffin' Young which eventually comprised 120 oil works extracting more than 100 million litres (22 million gallons) of oil from 3 million tonnes of shale annually in West Lothian, and employing up to 40,000 people. By the 1920s the industry met competition from crude oil drilled and pumped directly from the ground elsewhere in the world, but it was to continue for another 50 years.

Resembling the fingers of a defiantly clenched fist rising above the surrounding landscape, the bing still reaches a height of 240m (787 feet) above sea level. It is now a scheduled historic monument, protecting it from being quarried as hardcore for road construction, and provides an important habitat for a range of locally-threatened flora and fauna.