Cumnock and the Doon Valley badly need a new impetus. If you can leave the M74 motorway for the A70, you soon pass through Glespin, with its wall of grim sheds which lie derelict after use by Ramages as a distribution centre. Next comes Muirkirk, its boarded-up shops with empty lots between are book-ended by dereliction: and at 5pm on a March Saturday, the main street is patrolled by wee neds, who are friendly enough but wander across the road with blithe indifference to the coal trucks that hammer up and down it. Many miles later, Cumnock has a number of local government buildings, which contribute a higher than average amount to the local economy, the story of so many post-industrial communities.
Yet there is tremendous mineral wealth here still: the road passes several large opencast coal mines. They feed a railhead at Killoch, on the site of a deep mine which Thatcher’s government shut down; nearby is the site of the Barony Colliery, another superpit of the 1950’s which was closed prematurely, and stripped of everything bar its “A” frame headstock. It is a token left in a wasteland. After Killoch, you can leave the A70 and turn southwards at Drongan, and head towards Dalmellington, passing the gates of yet another opencast.
You quickly leave what civilisation there is behind … the scruffy houses on the edge of town give way to fields of sheep with grubby coats, then a few miles later, the Dalmellington road climbs into the uplands, and evidence of former coal mining activity is everywhere. This is not the couthy Burns country of Valentines’ postcards, but one of the poorest and most run-down areas in Britain. Where I’m headed lies in the dead heart of East Ayrshire, and would surely be a stopping-off point on a modern version of Edwin Muir’s “Scottish Journey”. This area certainly fits Muir’s characterisation of a country becoming lost to history: East Ayrshire takes in some of the oldest industrial landscapes in the world, yet today most are derelict.
A few miles further, and you reach Patna. Looking south-eastwards along the main road from the bank of the River Doon, you spot an old furnace clinker bing and a couple of tall chimney stacks. These remind you why people settled at Patna: it’s located on the very edge of the Ayrshire coalfield, and coal, fireclay, iron ore and limestone all lay nearby. Coal mining thrived in this area, and brought in its wake ironworks and brickworks: the Dalmellington Iron Company built Dunsakin – a few miles south of Patna – as an ironworks in 1848, and in due course it became part of Bairds & Dalmellington, in 1885. In Patna itself, its cluster of Victorian buildings sit on the river, and beyond lie streets of inter-war maisonettes, built for the miners and ironworkers who once worked for Bairds & Dalmellington.
The ironworks at Dunaskin had three good decades, but by 1921 demand had dropped due to competition from Lanarkshire, and this was compounded by the fact that the iron smelters at Dunaskin were old-fashioned and in need of serious investment. A strike put the “tin hat” on matters, and the ironworks shut. The furnaces were demolished in 1927-8, then a few years later, the site was redeveloped as a brickworks. The nearby Dunaskin Washery was retained to serve nearby collieries, and other ironworks buildings were adapted, such as the iron furnaces’ blowing house, a handsome Georgian affair which became the location for the brickmaking machinery: a conveyor fed ground clay from the mills at the back of the site. The brickmakers built a transverse-arch kiln in 1928, then added a 24 chamber Belgian Kiln, built in 1935 by William Cleghorn of Newmains. 
The brickworks became part of Scottish Brick Corporation around the same time that the coal industry was nationalised, but by 1976, the brickworks had suffered the same fate as the ironworks, and two-and-a-half million bricks lay stockpiled, unsold, before the works shut down. A decade on, plans were laid for an industrial museum: ten years later again, a heritage centre was developed to tell the story of the industries in the Doon Valley using the remaining structures on the site. It suffered from its remoteness, and in 2005 the museum failed after the local council withdrew its funding. Patna is a remote place, so low visitor numbers should have come as no surprise.
Apparently Scottish Coal still have a right of reversion, and the site could end up being developed for opencast: meantime, the buildings lie abandoned and have decayed dramatically. Nearby Patna has nothing to live for, either. As an exercise, I tried and failed to find accommodation here: the hotels in Patna lie boarded up, there are hardly any B&B’s within a 20 mile radius, and those which I phoned weren’t interested in opening. They merely gave me the number for someone else, who then did the same. It’s clear that tourism is not the answer: yet rather than hold these places up as examples of blight, candidates for the next Carbuncles, or have government officials refer slyly to areas of high SIMD (the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations, the latest euphemism for poverty), something radical could be done.
These worn-out towns and villages should be bulldozed. They’ve served their purpose. They were built to serve the ironworks and deep mines of the Ayrshire coalfield, but those have gone, so folk should be resettled where the work is today. Scottish Coal have several vast opencasts in this part of Ayrshire, so perhaps a new energy-based town could be created, becoming a centre of excellence for clean coal and biomass technology. Coal comes in by rail, as do trees from economic forestry in Galloway: power is generated, raw materials are processed, research jobs are created, a cluster of companies builds machinery to capitalise on the results. Anderson Strathclyde disappeared when the deep coal industry died; but Terex succeeds because surface mining needs earthmovers, and so forth.
Alongside renewables like wind and wave power (which have many detractors thanks to their inefficiency and visual impact); Scotland has hydro power (although development came to a halt in the 1960’s when the vested interests of landowners took over from the interests of all); nuclear stations (again, heavily criticised for their environmental impact); biomass and coal provide a fourth leg (both decried as dirty power, mind you). There is no such thing as a perfect source of energy – every method we have can be attacked for its impact, so it makes sense to spend money and create jobs in trying to improve the efficiency and reduce the impact of each one. Perhaps carbon capture and storage, alongside desulphurisation and ground remediation, could be further developed here?
A new town would have a powerful reason to exist, whereas at the moment, money is spent in trying to improve old housing, schools and facilities in dying communities. The Coalfields Regeneration Trust has granted cash to East Ayrshire in the past, but you might never fully solve the environmental, educational and health problems in these towns unless you catalyse new jobs. Yet playing Devil’s advocate – surely moving entire communities smacks of Statism, and the failed socialist planning of the Fifties and Sixties? No, because firstly Scotland’s government has pinned its hopes on energy sector jobs – offshore oil service jobs in Aberdeen, platforms and wind energy in Dundee and Methil, putative attempts at carbon capture at Longannet in Fife. 
Secondly, there is no long term future here as things stand, because the small towns of East Ayrshire only exist historically thanks to the coal and iron companies which sponsored them. All these communities are in some sense “artificial”, and it would be the most natural thing to the men who built them to see them wax and wane as we draw on the resources of the land which lies around them. Building a new town which lived synergistically with new jobs might be the stimulus East Ayrshire needs. Meantime, Dunaskin is slowly rotting away, one of few relics left of the Scottish ironmaking, and Scottish brickmaking, industries.
All photos copyright Mark Chalmers.
