The local limestone beds
The memoir groups the local rocks within the Hosie limestones and describes four beds in upward sequence: the Under Limestone, 3–4 feet thick; Middle Limestone, about 2 feet; Anvil Limestone, 1½ feet; and Calderwood Cement or Top Hosie Limestone, 9–12 inches. Together they occur within approximately 20–30 feet of strata. The beds are exposed in the gorge of the Rotten Calder at Calderwood Glen. The source associates local working with fluxing, an industrial use of limestone in metallurgical processes, while its mineral-resource scope also discusses other uses and economic quality elsewhere in Scotland. No claim that every Blantyre working served the same customer or process follows from this regional description.
Workings and landscape
South of Brankumhall, the 1949 account records a group of former quarries and a working of the Cement Limestone in old mines west of Long Calderwood. West and south of Auchentibber it lists old quarries, mines and shafts in the Middle and Under limestones, and the remains of kilns where stone was calcined. It says the workings stopped north of Newfield, while old shafts to the Cement Limestone continued beyond that area on a smaller scale. The memoir names Auchentibber and Crossbasket, Dikehead, Greenblairs and Newfield among localities in the Mines Department’s 1931 Catalogue of Plans of Abandoned Mines, volume V. This catalogue reference provides a promising documentary route to mine plans, but does not itself establish the exact extent or ownership of each working.
A specialist Scottish Cave and Mine Database entry later maps three infilled limestone adits east of Calder Glen, approximately at NS 66755 55215, NS 66695 55280 and NS 6648 5522. It says no clear trace remains beyond a low weathered outcrop near Auchentibber Road and Calderside Road, and notes old-quarry labels at the easternmost points on OS maps. These coordinates derive from a secondary register and are not yet reconciled with the 1949 localities or the old sheets. The shared word “Auchentibber” must not be taken to mean every recorded working lay at the farmstead itself. Scottish Cave and Mine Database entry · historical maps
Relationship to the wider mineral economy
The local coalfield and the limestone workings used different seams, extraction methods and site geographies. Limestone mines could follow relatively thin beds and include quarry faces, underground adits, shafts and burning kilns; the source does not establish that they were owned by the same firms that worked the coal collieries. The BGS BritPits layer provides a modern discovery index for mineral sites, but BGS warns that map-layer coverage and position are not definitive. Its records should be used to locate archival references and checked against the 1931 plans, Geological Survey mapping, OS editions and planning archaeology before being used to plot individual workings. Blantyre Colliery Prehistoric and archaeological sites of Blantyre
Where the mine plans may be held
The named 1931 catalogue entries provide a targeted path, but the underlying plan holdings have more than one administrative history. BGS archive descriptions distinguish microfilm copies of coal and oil-shale abandonment plans from a separate Scottish collection of non-coal plans, including limestone workings. The 2006 inventory says the Coal Authority holds originals for the Health and Safety Executive and that BGS had no complete digital index; it lists a paper catalogue as a finding aid. Current data.gov.uk metadata, updated in 2026, repeats the absence of a complete BGS digital index for the coal/oil-shale collection. These collection descriptions establish a route to investigate, not that any listed Blantyre mine plan is present, publicly digitised or reusable. The 1872 statutory deposit system also had an exemption for certain small non-coal mines, so the absence of a deposited plan would not by itself prove the absence of a working. bgs scottish abandoned mine plan collections bgs mining record office history data gov uk bgs scottish abandoned mine plans