GENERATIONS of travellers by road between Edinburgh and Glasgow have looked out for Kirk o’ Shotts Parish Church.
Despite successive road improvements and realignments, this apparently simple and uncompromising rectangular building with its gable-end belfry is still a landmark, symbolising the nourishing role of the Church of Scotland in a desolate upland area. It also gives the good news that the traveller is ‘over the hump’, and that it is downhill all the way to Glasgow (or Edinburgh).
The parish of Shotts is in North Lanarkshire, Historically it was largely moorland. In the 18th century it was, however, discovered that below its unpromising surface were substantial seams of coal and ironstone. Coal was probably first mined to satisfy local markets, but in 1787 an iron-smelting works was established at Omoa in the south of the parish. The name came from a West Indian place in whose capture Colonel William Dalrymple was involved. Fifteen years later, during the French wars, the Shotts Iron Company founded a second works close to what is now the town of Shotts. Omoa closed in 1866, but the Shotts works survived until 1947 when the coal industry was nationalised. The National Coal Board continued to mine coal in the parish until the later 20th century, and the traditional miners’ cottages were replaced by local authority housing. The Shotts works had its own village, known as Shotts Ironworks, on the southern border of the parish with that of Cambusnethan.