Until a few days ago, I was unaware of the existence of these giant lime kilns. In fact, I only found them by accident.
Clearly the world is a bit messed up at the moment and day trips (which is how I’ve always amused myself) are a little up in the air. However a trip to somewhere when the weather is nice should be fine as long as you keep your distance from people. Which I’m particularly skilled at, I have to say.
So I was looking on Google maps to see if I could find somewhere for us to go that might be a bit ‘out of the way’ and noticed a small harbour in a place called, Charlestown. Never heard of it. It’s literally 11 miles from my house as the crow flies, so in honesty I don’t have much of an excuse. It is out of the way, though. If you are heading up the Fife coast, you need to take a small detour to get there. So that’s my excuse.
When checking out Charlestown as a potential destination, I used the street view function (if you don’t use this, I highly recommend if when getting a look at places you are going to visit).
The harbour looked small but would be a nice and quiet place to go for a walk. It was when I turned the camera around that I got a bit of a shock. Why was there a Mediterranean style fortress on the banks of the Forth? Why couldn’t I see it from the satellite view? Had it been hidden from the internet, Area 51 style?
The reality is less fantasical but very interesting nonetheless. It wasn’t a fortress, built during the crusades by Templars, but rather the largest lime kiln in Scotland. Built in the mid 18th century, it was used to produce quicklime, which has a variety of uses in agriculture and construction. As with so many of the small villages that line the edges of the Forth River, Charlestown would have once been a bustling, working town. As it was, even on this gloriously sunny day during a period where so many people still aren’t back working full time, we barely saw a soul.
Somewhat confusingly, further along the road, there is a village called Limekilns, which does not have any lime kilns. I’m sure that this has thrown off many a tourist, looking to find some undiscovered Scotland. Maybe it’s the Templar/Area 51 thing again. *
It was hidden from the satellite view because the top has been completely reclaimed by nature. You can see in some of the photographs that there is a thick covering of grass and plants on the roof of the buildings. In fact the buildings are in the state they are in now due to the effects of flora, once there was no one there to tend to the structure. They were in danger of being completely destroyed until a group of conservationists (there’s a small visitor centre near the kilns) stepped in and cleared the growth and made the buildings safe again.
They made sure to allow animals access to the buildings to use as shelter.
There’s not a huge amount left to be seen and a lot of the building is out of limits to the public. I’m not sure if they ever do tours but I’d certainly like to get a better look at the inside and find out some more info about the whole thing.
You can stand inside some of the structures though and you get a feel for how large an operation it must have been. There would have been constant, dangerous work going on with boats in and out of the harbour.
There are many sites along the banks of the Forth that are now sleepy villages but were once key players in the industrial revolution. Charlestown is home to one of the more impressive remnants of the time.
*The village of Limekilns was the site of a large lime kiln industry until someone decided to move it half a mile up the road. By that point it would have been weird to change the name of a village that was several hundred years old by that point. So Limekilns kept that name and Charlestown was named after its founder, Charles Bruce, 5th Earl of Elgin
Sadly, there is no Templar/Area 51 connection.
Or is there….