Oakley

A historical perspective, drawn from the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland: A Survey of Scottish Topography, Statistical, Biographical and Historical, edited by Francis H. Groome and originally published in parts by Thomas C. Jack, Grange Publishing Works, Edinburgh between 1882 and 1885.

This edition is copyright © The Editors of the Gazetteer for Scotland, 2002-2022.

It has taken much time and money to make the six-volumes of Groome's text freely accessible. Please help us continue and develop by making a donation. If only one out of every ten people who view this page gave £5 or $10, the project would be self-sustaining. Sadly less than one in thirty-thousand contribute, so please give what you can.

Use the tabs on the right of this page to see other parts of this entry

Oakley, a village at the mutual border of Carnock parish, Fife, and Culross parish, Perthshire, with a station on the Stirling and Dunfermline branch of the North British railway, 4 ³/₈ miles W by N of Dunfermline. Built in connection with the Forth or Oakley Iron-works (1846), it chiefly consists of stone, one-story, slated dwelling-houses, disposed in rows, with intervening spaces more than double the breadth of the streets of the New Town of Edinburgh; and has a post office under Dunfermline, St Margaret's Roman Catholic church (1843), and a public school. The iron-works, now stopped, had six furnaces, with stalks 180 feet high; and the engine-house was built of a very beautiful sandstone, with walls so deeply founded and so massive as to comprise 60, 000 cubic feet of stone below the surface of the ground. Pop. (1861) 1817, (1871) 1127, (1881) 3l2, of whom 92 were in Culross.—Ord. Sur., sh. 40, 1867.

An accompanying 19th C. Ordnance Survey map is available, or use the map tab to the right of this page.

Note: This text has been made available using a process of scanning and optical character recognition. Despite manual checking, some typographical errors may remain. Please remember this description dates from the 1880s; names may have changed, administrative divisions will certainly be different and there are known to be occasional errors of fact in the original text, which we have not corrected because we wish to maintain its integrity. This information is provided subject to our standard disclaimer