RSPB’s article about the bird lagoon at Hunterston highlighted the ornithological value of this relatively unknown part of the area developed by the British Steel Corporation in the early 1970s. It is therefore worth explaining in more detail how the lagoon came to exist.
As older readers will recall BSC’s initial plans for Hunterston were for a deepwater jetty and stockyard with iron ore and coal being taken from the stockyard by overhead conveyor to a rail loading facility located on the main West Kilbride to Fairlie railway.
Thus the 1972 plans showed the northern limit of the proposed industrial development being what is now the south side of the lagoon, and as such at some distance from homes in Fairlie.
BSC then decided to construct within its site a plant to convert iron ore into concentrated iron pellets, thus saving on transport costs to the Ravenscraig Steelworks. But the transport of the iron pellets needed to be done directly by rail and it was therefore necessary to bring a railway line into the site instead of using the ore conveyor system.
The difference in level between the main line and the pelletisation plant and the maximum allowable gradient for heavily loaded trains resulted in the new line needing to be of some length. Thus before most people were really aware a plan appeared in 1974 for the line which now exists. This took the industrial development very much closer to Fairlie than originally understood with the necessity for the major mounding which, while referred to by BSC as an environmental screen, was in reality a railway embankment.
The new railway resulted in a large part of the intertidal sands being cut off from the sea, and thereafter becoming the nature reserve it now is. But the direct reduction plant for which the railway was built never worked and is long gone, and it is thus perhaps ironic, given the RSPB’s opposition to nuclear power, that today the main use of the line which created the lagoon is the servicing of the Hunterston power station!
J Riddell
49 Castlepark Drive
Fairlie
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