Robert Bald

Scottish surveyor, civil and mining engineer and antiquarian, born at Culross on 4 December 1776 and died in Clackmannanshire on 28 December 1861. The son of Alexander Bald, colliery agent at Alloa for the Earl of Mar, he became one of the earliest and most eminent mining engineers and land surveyors in Scotland and was called by the late nineteenth century 'the acknowledged father of mining engineering in Scotland'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Geological Society of London and the Institution of Civil Engineers, he spent much of his working life employed by the mine-owning Erskine family of Alloa Tower. His A General View of the Coal Trade of Scotland (1808) set out the conditions in which miners and their families lived and worked, with an inquiry into the women who carried coal underground as bearers; he tried to stop the employment of women and children as coal bearers in 1822, met opposition from miners whose families depended on the earnings, and in 1835 took over the running of the Collyside, Woodlands and Devonside collieries on his own philanthropic principles.

In the archive

• Manager · Devon Colliery — The Erskine family's mining engineer and manager at their Clackmannanshire collieries, and the man the Alloa Advertiser's account of Devon Colliery names alongside Erskine as its sinker.

Sources

1. A walk in the past: disaster at the Devon Colliery, Alloa Advertiser
2. Robert Bald, Wikipedia
3. Robert Bald — Clackmannanshire.scot, Clackmannanshire.scot

Record created: 28 September 2026 · Last researched: 28 September 2026