Greenbank and the Ghost Village of Haywood

The ruined grocery store at Greenbank overlooks a wild expanse of featureless moorland. You reach it along a grassy track that winds up a slope past a series of ridges and terraces overgrown with tussocks of rough grass. This is Haywood, Clydesdale’s largest ghost village, once home to over a thousand people, and now a scheduled monument. Haywood was laid out in a network of streets and squares with its own church, post office, police station, public hall, and a number of shops. It even had its own railway station. Today the roofless ruin at Greenbank is almost all that remains of a once sizeable settlement and a proud community

Greenbank was site of a farmstead long before the industrial age, set besiden a long-lost track that continued across the moorland to the south. It is shown on the 1858 map as a row of three simple dwellings, described as thatched, but in a poor condition.

Coal was first worked in the Haywood district late in the 18th century, however most of these early pits were abandoned following collapse of the Wilsontown Iron Company in 1812. Mining resumed on a much larger scale following the formation of the Haywood Gas Coal Co. in around 1860. The company was a partnership between Hugh Bartholemew, chief engineer of Glasgow’s Dalmarnock gasworks and acknowledged expert on the gas industry, and Ronald Johnstone, an engineer and industrialist, Johnstone was later to purchase the lovely Sunnyside house, overlooking the Clyde just downstream of Lanark. The company was set up to work the rich seam of Wilsontown gas coal, which was in great demand for town gas production. Much of the output of the Haywood pits was transported by rail to Granton, and then shipped to London to fuel the capital’s gas works.

The company built the new village of Haywood to house their rapidly growing workforce during the 1860’s and 70’s. Basic brick-built rows with slated roofs were constructed without a damp course and with internal walls left unplastered, The village contained about 240 dwellings, most being single room homes arranged back-to-back within a row. To serve the remote community, the company opened a grocery store in 1864, which secured a drinks licence. Arrangements were later examined by the Truck Commission, a government body set up to ensure that workers were paid in cash rather than in goods. It was found that at Haywood, it was common to advance wages ahead of fortnightly pay days, and that a portion of advance wages were provided in the form of credit at the company store.

It seems that the old farmstead at Greenbank lay unoccupied for a period, but was reconstructed as a grocery shop sometime in the 1870’s, offering an alternative to the company store. It was a number of years before William Kechans of Greenbank was successful in securing a licence to sell alcohol in his store, although it was recognised that grocer’s carts calling at the village surreptitiously brought drinks orders in from licensed premises in Carnwath or Forth. In addition to carts, and some small-scale shops within the rows, West Calder Cooperative Society opened a branch in Haywood in 1894. As a licensed grocers however, Mr & Mrs. Kechans played a special role at the heart of the community; catering for events, and releasing land close to the Greenbank store as a quoiting green.

Output of gas coal declined during the 1890’s, causing much hardship, and leading to a significant decline in the population of the village. The closure of the last of the Haywood Gas Coal Co.’s pits was announced in 1901, and press articles proclaimed that “the village is practically doomed”. About half of the rows in the villages, which had been unoccupied for some period, were demolished at around that time, and the remaining houses sold. It seems however that many still held great affection for the old village, and some miners finding work at the coal pits of Wilsontown and Climpy, or the oil works of Tarbrax chose to remain in the rows at Haywood. The County Council served a closure order on slum property at Haywood sparking, in 1926, a vigorous campaign that new council housing should be built at Haywood rather than at Forth, as this was more central to employment opportunities at that time. The council resisted the plea, perhaps having insight that Tarbrax oil works were destined for imminent closure.

By 1950 only twenty families continued to live at Haywood amongst the ruins and ghosts of an earlier age. The licensed grocers at Greenbank continued to do business; presumably delivering groceries to the surrounding area by motor van. Even this was threatened in 1952 when the licensee of the Greenbank store was convicted a further time for drink driving, and faced losing his licence. He told the court that the collision with a parked car was a consequence of trying to swipe away a bee in the cab of his van. It was explained that the van was by then the only motor vehicle in Haywood and vital in giving lifts to the few remaining residents of the village. He received a lenient sentence.

It seems likely that by 1960 Haywood’s last residents had moved on, and all had been demolished except for Greenbank, and a tumbledown building close to the entrance to the village, which were left to slowly decay.