A gaunt metal pier projecting into the waters of the River Forth offers a reminder of industry on the Fife coastline. The pier at Inverkeithing was constructed with the promise of opportunity, but was quickly abandoned as the quarry it was built to serve closed down. Now it is obsolete, a memorial to a lost industry.
The pier was intended to service a £7 million quarrying contract, but helped ruin its owners. It brought to an end almost a century of rock extraction at Prestonhill Quarry, Inverkeithing. The quarry opened in 1896 for the extraction of dolerite, an igneous rock used in the road-building industry, then primarily for kerbs, setts and paving stones. Dolerite is incredibly hard and highly durable, and was favoured for heavy-duty construction. In later years, the crushed stone would be sold as aggregate. The quarry passed through various hands and, in 1923, was operated by the Forth Quarry Company Ltd, which remained in business until the end of 1979.
In the 1970s, the site was taken over by Amalgamated Quarries (Scotland) Ltd, a company formed by John Miller Contractors, a firm that was involved in major road-building projects across Scotland. By the mid-1970s, Amalgamated Quarries (Scotland) Ltd was one of the largest and most ambitious quarrying companies in the UK. It saw scope for an expansion of operations at Prestonhill and commissioned a £2 million investment in the quarry and its infrastructure.
This included the construction of a pier projecting into the deep waters of Inverkeithing Bay. Hewn from steel and supported by slender metal legs, the lattice structure was topped off with a conveyor belt that would load crushed stone directly from the quarry into waiting cargo ships. The pier was completed in 1977 and was intended to service a seven-year contract to export road stone to Europe. The investment also included new conveyors within the quarry and sophisticated new machinery within the crushing plant and was intended to secure the future of the quarry for a further 30 years and protect the jobs of the 150-strong Fife workforce.
With the opening of the pier, quarried stone was crushed on site before being moved via an overhead conveyor belt gantry system. The rock was transported across the site to the pier on Inverkeithing Bay. However, the project came too late to save the quarry and its owner and, in October 1977, receivers were called in. While Amalgamated Quarries (Scotland) Ltd was bought out of receivership, Prestonhill Quarry did not survive for long and closed in 1980.
The shoreside section of the conveyor was dismantled and scrapped. However, the pier projecting into the bay was simply abandoned, a sheet of metal installed to prevent people from accessing it. It stands to this day, a rusty reminder of the Fife coast’s industrial past. The landfall of the pier can be accessed by following the well-signed Fife Coastal Path from the southern end of Inverkeithing’s Preston Crescent.
The 44-acre quarry site has, over recent years, been at the centre of controversial plans to redevelop it for housing and leisure. However, to date, nothing has come of these, and it sits abandoned and water-filled.
If you have enjoyed this article, you might like to PayPal.me or buy me a coffee, which helps support the site and funds new content.
Secret Scotland 