Bellyford Burn’s old coal-mine spoil heaps preserve Carboniferous plant fossils beside the Pencaitland Railway Walk, west of Ormiston. Shale fragments contain stems, including reported Calamites, and less frequent leaf impressions. The Limestone Coal Formation records the sediment and vegetation of an ancient delta landscape, now brought to the surface in discarded mine rock.
FIND FREQUENCY: ♦♦♦ – The original account records common stems and fewer, less well-preserved leaves.
CHILDREN: ♦♦♦ – Retained historical rating; keep children supervised on the established railway path, not on the spoil slopes.
ACCESS: ♦♦♦ – Railway-walk approach from the car park by Puddle Bridge; the old guide estimated about a mile to the heaps. Heap access and conditions need checking.
TYPE: Coal-mine spoil containing plant-bearing shale. These ratings describe the historical guide, not a current safety assessment.
DIRECTIONS
♦ Use the Railway Walk car park by Puddle Bridge on the B6371, north of Ormiston, then follow the Pencaitland Railway Walk west alongside the Bellyford Burn. Consult the council-linked Tranent South paths map and signs on arrival.
♦ The original guide places the two spoil heaps about a mile along the walk from this approach. Remain on the established path: the precise entrances and present boundaries of the heaps have not been confirmed. The old east-side parking and right-hand-heap directions should not be relied upon.
♦ Original locality reference: 55.914645°N, 2.9592302°W.
♦ Original grid reference: NT 40141 69477.
♦ Original nearest postcode: EH35 5LY. These are the guide’s source values for the locality, not verified car-park navigation details.
FOSSIL HUNTING
The attraction at Bellyford Burn is the plant-bearing shale discarded during coal mining. The original visit found abundant broken shale and many fossil stems, with leaves less frequent and often less distinct. Small fragments can show only part of a plant, so a clear ribbed surface or branching impression is more useful than a large but featureless block.
Calamites is reported in the original guide. These tree-sized relatives of horsetails produced jointed, longitudinally ribbed stems; a transverse node crossing the ribs can help distinguish a stem impression from simple scratches or shale layering. The photographed narrow ribbed fragments are useful comparison material, but their appearance does not establish a species.
The original photographs also include rooting remains consistent with Stigmaria, recognised cautiously from the regularly spaced, rounded rootlet scars. This name refers to the rooting organs of tree-like lycopsids, rather than to a leaf or a complete plant species. Less distinct plant and leaf impressions are also present. Do not assign a familiar fern or lycopsid species to a fragment without diagnostic features.
Where access and collecting have been agreed, examine already loose, naturally separated pieces on stable ground rather than excavating the heaps. Look across bedding surfaces in low-angle light: faint impressions may be easier to see when shadows pick out their relief. Check both matching halves when a piece has already split, and photograph the surface with a scale before handling it further. Weathered shale may crumble, so support thin slabs from underneath.
The material is mixed spoil, not a continuous rock exposure. A fossil collected from a heap cannot be assigned to the Four Feet, Tranent Splint or another coal seam simply because that seam was worked nearby. Record Bellyford Burn, the date and the actual collecting position, and keep that information with the specimen. The runoff photograph retained later in this guide documents the old visit; it is not a recommendation to enter erosion channels or undermine a slope.
Dated mining milestones at Bellyford Colliery, providing context for the fossil-spoil locality.
These are records of the named colliery, not dated fossil discoveries or proof of the origin of either surviving heap.
1891 – Chapel Pit arrangements documented
A plan dated 11 July 1891, prepared by mining engineer James Tweedie, records the pithead, pitbottom and a cross-section of Chapel Pit at Bellyford Colliery. It documents established mining at the named locality.
1949–1954 – A new Bellyford mine developed
Sinking began in April 1949 and production started in January 1954. This was a later phase of mining at Bellyford, not its first recorded working.
1961–1962 – Production ended and abandonment followed
Production stopped in November 1961 and abandonment was recorded in December 1962. The record also notes latter use as an airway mine, without dating that phase. These dates concern the mine’s operating history; they do not date the discovery of fossils in the heaps.
GEOLOGY
The mining district northwest of Ormiston lies within the Limestone Coal Formation of the Clackmannan Group. Its rocks are Carboniferous, assigned by the British Geological Survey to the Pendleian, the early part of the traditional Namurian regional division. At Bellyford Burn the collecting material is artificial spoil: rock excavated from underground and tipped at the surface. Its present slopes and layers are products of tipping and erosion, not the original sedimentary succession.
The formation developed in a low-lying delta landscape. Rivers and channels supplied sand, while quieter water received finer silt and mud. Vegetated surfaces and waterlogged swamps developed between episodes of sedimentation; buried peat became coal, and associated muds preserved plant impressions. Repeated changes in these environments produced cycles of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone with seatearths and coal. Ironstone occurs as a subordinate component. Despite the formation’s name, limestone is rare rather than a dominant rock throughout it.
The fine-grained shale is particularly important to collectors because bedding surfaces can retain the flattened outlines and surface detail of plant remains. Mining broke up and mixed this sedimentary record. Four Feet and Five Feet coals are documented as Bellyford workings; Tranent Splint and numbered Diamond seams also belong to the surrounding mining record. None provides a demonstrated source bed for the fossils in either heap. Regional faulting further complicates tracing seams underground, but no particular fault or displacement has been established here.
The chart summarises the geological setting rather than a measured section. The expandable account separates the formation framework, individual local seam records and a clearly labelled nearby historical comparison.
The following photograph and its original caption record the 2017 visit. Erosion can expose shale, but runoff channels and their edges can be unstable; do not enter them or remove material from their sides.
Detailed geological framework and local coal-seam evidence, with the limits of the spoil record.
Artificial spoil and provenance. The two heaps contain excavated mine waste rather than an in-situ measured section. Their apparent layering cannot be used to order beds, calculate formation thickness or correlate an individual fossil with a coal seam. No formal member or specimen source horizon is established for the material.
CLACKMANNAN GROUP
The Clackmannan Group is the modern parent unit of the Limestone Coal Formation. Older district descriptions use “Limestone Coal Group” for the rocks now treated at formation rank; this historical term is not an additional group beneath the modern Clackmannan Group.
Limestone Coal Formation
Age, lithology and boundaries. The formation is Pendleian (early Namurian), within the Carboniferous. Repeated sandstone, siltstone and mudstone successions include seatearths, coals and subordinate ironstone; limestones are rare and local. Seatearths record former soil horizons beneath coal-forming vegetation. The formal regional limits run from the top of the Top Hosie Limestone to the base of the Index Limestone. Neither boundary limestone is demonstrated as an exposure in these heaps, and no formation thickness is assigned to them.
Four Feet Coal. The 1914 mine list records Bellyford working the Four Feet and Five Feet seams. In district accounts the Four Feet seam is also written Four Foot. It lies above the Five Foot Coal and below the Three Foot, Parrot Rough and Tranent Splint coals in the regional succession. The seam’s name is not a measured four-foot thickness at the heaps. Shale discarded with coal workings is a plausible general source of plant-bearing spoil, but the source roof or floor of any collected block remains unknown.
Five Feet Coal. This second explicitly recorded Bellyford seam is termed Five Foot in the geological memoir. It lies below Four Foot and above the regional Diamond coals. The memoir describes a seam around 1 m thick in the Tranent–Elphinstone–Ormiston collieries; that is district information, not a measurement at Bellyford Burn’s heaps. Its documented extraction adds useful local mining context without identifying which heap, if either, received its waste.
Tranent Splint Coal. This is a higher seam in the local coalfield succession, above Parrot Rough and Three Foot and hence above Four Foot. Its occurrence near Ormiston provides context for the original guide’s mention of it. The surrounding mine-plan catalogue also uses Gillespie (Splint), but historical naming alone does not establish a secure seam-by-seam correlation or prove that either heap contains its roof or floor rocks.
Diamond seams. The mine-plan catalogue for grid square NT4069 records No. 1 and No. 2 Diamond among seams in workings associated with several collieries, including Bellyford. The geological memoir uses Upper and Lower Diamond for regional coals below Five Foot. The numbered and upper/lower names are not equated here: that requires secure plan or correlation evidence. The original mention of Diamond No. 1 therefore remains a local historical mining term, not an identified fossil-bearing bed at either heap.
Nearby historical comparison: the Four Feet working at Limeylands. Kenneth M. White’s 1941 account describes older workings reached in March 1938 from Limeylands Colliery, between North Mains and the railway beside Bellyford Burn. His figure records, from roof to floor, “fakey fireclay and blaes”, a 21-inch top coal, an 18-inch splinty bottom coal and a sandstone pavement. The workings were shallow, with clay and gravel above, and the coal about 15 ft below the valley surface. This is a genuine historical coal-leaf section nearby, not a measured section through the fossil heaps or proof that their shale came from that roof.
Other district seams and structure. The same grid-square archive also names Great, Blackchapel (Parrot), Three Feet and Ball coals. Because its plans cover several collieries, these names cannot all be attributed to extraction at Bellyford or to the surviving spoil. Regional faults affect seam continuity, but an exact fault geometry at the heaps is unverified. No specific natural superficial deposit has been assigned to the heap reference; excavated spoil must be kept distinct from the clay and gravel described at White’s nearby workings.
References.
BGS Lexicon: Clackmannan Group.
BGS Lexicon: Limestone Coal Formation.
McAdam and Tulloch (1985), Geology of the Haddington district, especially the coal succession and regional structure.
Fourth Statistical Account of East Lothian: coal-industry appendices, including the 1914 mine list and later colliery dates.
National Records of Scotland, mine-plan catalogue RHP146000/913 (NT4069); catalogue evidence, not inspected underground plans.
White (1941), Notes on an Old Coal-working and a Wooden Shovel from Ormiston, East Lothian, especially Figure 1.
McLean (2018), Scottish coal seam names and correlations: regional names require locality-specific checking.
SAFETY
The last field inspection recorded for this guide was in 2017. Present heap stability, fencing and mining or vehicle activity have not been checked. Loose shale, steep spoil and erosion channels can be slippery or unstable, especially after rain. Do not dig into, undercut or climb unstable spoil, and keep clear of channel edges and any fenced or restricted ground.
The original account warns of former mine workings nearby; it does not establish where openings or other hazards exist today. Stay on the recognised railway path unless a safe, permitted approach has been confirmed. Keep children supervised on the path, give cyclists and other walkers room, and do not assume that the trail’s accessibility extends onto the heaps. Inland collecting avoids tidal cut-offs, but weather and ground conditions still matter.
EQUIPMENT
For examining permitted loose material, take sturdy footwear with a good grip, a hand lens, a scale for photographs and small rigid boxes padded with tissue or foam. Support thin shale pieces on a firm backing rather than packing them loose in a bag. Label specimens and matching pieces at once. A hammer or digging tool is not needed to inspect naturally separated surfaces, and this guide does not recommend opening the spoil slopes or carrying away large blocks.
CLEANING AND TREATING
Plant-bearing shale can split or flake as it dries. Avoid forced drying or heating; keep fragile pieces supported and seek advice if they begin to crack or flake. Keep matching pieces together. Begin with a very soft dry brush away from delicate impressions. Do not soak the shale, scrub carbonaceous films or apply acid, bleach, household varnish or oil; these can damage both the rock and the features needed for identification.
Consolidation is not automatically necessary. If an important specimen is actively flaking, keep detached pieces, minimise handling and obtain preparation advice before treatment. Leave potentially significant specimens unprepared until assessed.
IDENTIFY YOUR FINDS
Need help identifying a fossil? Share clear photos, where you found it and its size with the community.
FURTHER READING
BGS: Geology of the Haddington district — regional coalfield background
East Lothian coal-industry records — Bellyford mining history
White’s 1941 account of nearby old Ormiston coal workings
East Lothian Council: paths and countryside visitor information
ACCESS RIGHTS
The council-supported Pencaitland Railway Walk is a recreational route; this does not establish permission to enter the adjoining spoil heaps or remove fossils. The current land or mineral-rights owner, collecting consent and any conditions have not been confirmed. Seek permission from the appropriate landowner or mineral-rights owner before collecting and follow notices on the ground. The council’s management of the path should not be treated as consent for the heaps.
NatureScot mapping checked in October 2026 identified no SSSI at the published locality point or within 500 m. This is a bounded map check, not a survey of both heaps. The Bellyford Burn corridor has local biodiversity and landscape interests whose precise overlap with the spoil has not been resolved; absence of an SSSI does not establish unrestricted collecting rights.
Scotland’s fossil resource is at risk of abuse and damage, and so we must all safeguard and manage fossil collecting to ensure its survival for future generations. For this reason it is VITAL you read and adhere to the Scottish Fossil Code for ALL sites in Scotland.
It is important to follow our ‘Code of Conduct’ when collecting fossils or visiting any site. Please also read our ‘Terms and Conditions‘.
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