Rab Wilson's poem on the Barony A-frame

The Scots poet Rab Wilson served his engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board at Barony Colliery and left the pits after the 1984–85 strike. In Accent o the Mind (2006) he casts the preserved Barony A-frame as an occult wicker-man, an emissary of an ancient god that demanded sweat, tears and the blood of those sacrificed on the altar of Mammon and progress.

The mining history in this record

Rab Wilson was born at New Cumnock, Ayrshire, in 1960 and held an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board at Barony Pit, near Auchinleck. He gave up mining as a result of the 1984–85 miners' strike and trained as a psychiatric nurse. He writes mainly in Scots: a Scots version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was followed by three collections of his own poetry, Accent o the Mind (Luath Press, 2006), Life Sentence and A Map for the Blind; he was Robert Burns Writing Fellow for Dumfries and Galloway, sat on the Parliamentary Working Group on the Scots Language in 2009–10 and became the National Trust for Scotland's Scriever in Residence at the Burns Birthplace Museum. Accent o the Mind includes sonnets inspired by the miners' strike of 1984–85.

The A-frame he writes of is the 180-foot headgear built in 1954 over Barony's No. 3 shaft during the colliery's modernisation. On 8 November 1962 the No. 2 shaft collapsed, killing four men; the colliery was rebuilt and worked on until 17 February 1989, when its last 400 men were laid off. The A-frame was listed in 1990, the last of its type in Britain, and restored by the Barony A Frame Trust in 2007 at a cost of more than £1 million. In the lines the historian Andrew Perchard quotes from Accent o the Mind, the structure is "lik some occult wicker-man, / Grim emissary of some auncient god, / Wha, like a god, demandit sweit an tears, / An the bluid o thaim that wir sacrificed / Oan the altar o Mammon an progress."

Perchard, writing in 2020 for the Coal and Community project, sets the poem beside the colliery's headstone to the dead of 1962 and the recollection of Margaret Glover, whose husband Archie wound the last cage at Barony: the A-frame, he writes, looks out over the Ayrshire landscape as a reminder of its mining past, and its memory is captured in Wilson's words.

People

Rab Wilson (born 1960), Scots poet and language campaigner, apprentice engineer at Barony with the National Coal Board until the 1984–85 strike. Andrew Perchard, historian, who quotes the poem in his 2020 account of Barony for Coal and Community. Archie Glover, who wound the last cage at Barony in 1989, and his widow Margaret Glover, whose recollection Perchard records.

Legacy today

The A-frame stands as a monument on the colliery site west of Auchinleck, reopened by the Duke of Rothesay in 2008 after its restoration, with a memorial to the men killed there. Wilson has continued to write of mining: his Luath collection Collier Laddie is a tribute to miners.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each tagged with how solidly it's grounded and attached to the source(s) that support it. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• Rab Wilson held an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board at Barony Pit and gave up mining as a result of the 1984–85 strike, training instead as a psychiatric nurse. (documented fact) ^1,2
• In Accent o the Mind (Edinburgh, 2006) Wilson likens the Barony A-frame to an occult wicker-man demanding the sweat, tears and blood of those sacrificed on the altar of Mammon and progress. (documented fact) ³
• Accent o the Mind was published by Luath Press in 2006 and includes sonnets inspired by the miners' strike of 1984–85. (documented fact) ^1,2
• The Barony A-frame, 180 feet high, was built in 1954, listed in 1990 after the colliery closed in 1989, and restored in 2007 by the Barony A Frame Trust. (documented fact) ⁴
• The colliery held out until 17 February 1989, when its remaining 400 men were laid off; the last cage was wound by Archie Glover. (documented fact) ³
• Andrew Perchard sets the poem beside the headstone to Barony's dead as the colliery's memory, in his 2020 account of the pit for Coal and Community. (contemporary account) ³

Mines

• Barony Colliery — East Ayrshire
  Rab Wilson was an NCB apprentice engineer at Barony until the 1984-85 strike; his poem in Accent o the Mind (2006) is about the colliery's preserved A-frame, quoted by Andrew Perchard in his account of the pit.

Disasters

• Barony Colliery shaft collapse, 1962 — 8 November 1962

Real-world mining concepts used here

Headgear

Sources

1. (secondary) Rab Wilson — Wikipedia
2. (secondary) Accent O the Mind: Vibrant Scots Poetry by Rab Wilson — Luath Press
3. (secondary) Barony: A Fight for Life (Andrew Perchard) — Coal and Community, University of Wolverhampton
4. (secondary) Barony A Frame — Wikipedia

Record created: 24 September 2026 · Last researched: 3 October 2026