Archaeological Background
Prestongrange is an open air colliery museum located between Musselburgh and Prestonpans. Standing remains of the 19th century colliery predominate the site but also visually disguise the fact that the site has had a lengthy and highly significant social and economic past.
We know from historical documents and cartographic sources that the area was being used for coal exploitation and salt panning as far back as the 12th and 13th century and that the land was leased to the monks of Newbattle. We know that a harbour at Morrison’s Haven was established by the 16th century by Newbattle Abbey and that prior to the harbour accounts suggest that there would have been some stores and workshops at the coast. The harbour was subject to continual repair and improvement until it was abandoned in the early 20th century and is now partly filled in with ash waste and other debris.
By the 17th century Prestongrange was home to an industrial glass making facility, the first of its kind in Scotland. In the early part of the 17th century fine glassware was being produced by itinerant Venetian glass workers and by the later part of the same century, mirror glass and plate glass were being produced. By the 18th century a pottery was founded on exactly the same site as the glassworks and, together with other important east coast potteries of the period, was producing various pottery wares that were being exported across Europe and further afield
The coal industry of the estate of Prestongrange was revitalised by the sinking
of Scotland’s first deep (70 fathom; c140 metre) shaft close to the site of the pottery in 1829. By the 1870s the colliery expanded, with a second shaft in 1872-4 and a third (air) shaft around 1914-18, however, coal production ceased in 1961 and, finally, brick production ceased around 1975.
Further Historical Research
Historical research undertaken by Dr Richard Oram, during Phase 1 of the project, has confirmed the sheer wealth of industrially related documentation relating to Prestongrange.
"What has emerged from this work very clearly is that this was no backwater but, from the outset, was intended to be a significant commercial venture that could challenge the local dominance of Leith. There is a very powerful story to be told here;.there is a very substantial documentary record relating not only to the concentration of sites around Morrison’s Haven which are the focus for the current project but also for the barony of Prestongrange in general. All work to date, including this current report, do little more than scratch the surface and draw attention to a series of key themes. What is also very evident is the interconnectedness of the material, with the salt, coal, glass and pottery works all being closely interdependent, and the mills and harbour itself being inseparable from the wider industrial picture. Past studies which have focused on one dimension of the industrial operations in the district inevitably draw down barriers which artificially separate the mutually supportive activities. Prestongrange offers the opportunity to explore an early seventeenth- and eighteenth-century example of the kind of industry more familiar in the nineteenth-century ‘Industrial Revolution in the west of Scotland'"
Dr Oram also added:
"One aspect that has come through particularly strongly in the records consulted for this work is the strength of the human dimension. While most documentary research can provide detail about the social and economic elites who financed, developed and grew rich on such operations, normally the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum who laboured in them are invisible. At Prestongrange and Morrison’s Haven, there is a clear opportunity to maintain a strongly human angle within the work and to explore the lives of the ordinary coal- and saltworkers, the fishermen and sea-men working there between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. It is rare for such a record material to survive and the opportunity to make this data available to a wider public should not be missed"
To read more about the historical research undertaken during Phase 1 why not download the report
