1891 Census: Sourlie

Ten years have passed again and the Campbell family have moved, this time to Sourlie, near to the area they first moved to from Fife in 1861, living at 18, Low Sourlie. By now, John who is 65 and Margaret, 63, have only their son, Matthew, 22, living at home with them.

Andrew, my great grandfather, has married Sarah Kilpatrick and is living nearby at 10, High Sourlie with their first child, Agnes, who is only one year old.

Sourlie lies approximately 1km south of Benslie where the family first lived in Ayrshire in 1861. An attractive native woodland has now been planted where the former coal yard stood. 

John Campbell is now a pit scree-man, at the local colliery, probably too old to be at the pit face after a lifetime of hewing coal. A pit scree-man passed the coals over the skreens, riddling the coal into the waggons, getting rid of any stones, slates, brasses, &c. He would get paid in proportion to the quantity of dirt picked out from among the coals. Mathew and Andrew are listed as miners at this time.

The pits that they worked in were owned by the Eglinton Estate, now a country park. A dense network of mineral railway lines (railway lines built for the soul purpose of transporting coal and other mineral) existed in the 19th and 20th centuries; the trackbed now being used as cycle paths in several places. A very complex set of collieries, coal pits, tile works, fire-clay works and workers villages are evident from records such as OS maps. Little now remains of the buildings and railway lines, apart from at Lady Ha’ Colliery, but irregular depressions in the ground, embankments, cuttings, coal bings and abandoned bridges all bear witness to what was at one time a very active coalfield with associated industries and infrastructure.

In 1872 the 14th Earl, Archibald William, took in £9,500 a year from mineral royalties, around £900,000 in modern terms (2009); he collected an additional £37,000 a year from rents, worth around £2,500,000 in 2009.