About forty five years ago I worked in this factory in Dalgety Bay when this part was known as Hillend Industrial Estate. It belonged to an American company called Bournes (Trimpot), who manufactured potentiometers amongst other things. We were at the cutting edge of science but at the blunt edge of wages, conditions, health and safety, industrial relations and planning. The management were mostly drunken, sweary, self serving sexists but it was the hard living 70s and nobody knew any better or cared. My time there was brief and hardly covered in glory, I was a lazy eighteen year old with little interest in the job or even finding a career of any sort. I was someplace between drifting and free falling but not in any poetic sense. I did hit the ground a few years later. I'm not actually sure when Bournes closed down and production ceased, I left in 1974 and I understand the building has been empty for some time, one or two careful owners maybe. A few weeks ago some kid torched it thereby rendering it even harder to let or sell. It's now another sorry scar on a blot on the landscape. Scorched earth in Fife's industrial history.
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