Fife

Kincardine power station was a large coal-fired power station on the shores of the upper Firth of Forth by Kincardine on Forth, Fife, Scotland. This... facility, opened in 1962 for the then South of Scotland Electricity Board , was constructed to take advantage of post-WW2 expansion of the Fife and Lothian coalfields. Coal was supplied by Merry-go-round trains. It was capable of generating 760 MW peak load, and when commissioned could produce up to one third of Scotland's total electricity needs. Operations ceased in the late 1990s, and the facility had been demolished by 2001. The new Clackmannanshire Bridge built across the Firth of Forth and completed in late 2008 may have used a small part of the site for the bridge approaches. The site was used for the storage of a large quantity of track materials for the rebuilding of the Stirling-Alloa-Kincardine rail link which is now operating, and currently being used as a coal unloading area. This facility was latterly owned by the privatised Scottish Power utility group.
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Richard Jobson is a Scottish singer-songwriter and film-maker, best known as a television presenter, film director, producer and screenwriter.... Jobson grew up in Ballingry, Fife, the son of a miner and a worker at Rosyth Dockyard, attending St. Columba's R.C. High School, Dunfermline. He was formerly lead singer with the art-punk rock group, The Skids. Jobson's singing style with the Skids was highly distinctive, and he wrote the lyrics, while Stuart Adamson wrote most of the music. Scared to Dance, the first Skids album, featured the hit 1979 single "Into the Valley", the group's most successful single. Jobson appeared on BBC Television's Top of the Pops singing it. The album also featured "The Saints are Coming" whose lyrics about storms and drowning came back to light after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. In September 2006 it was announced that Green Day and U2 were to record a cover version of the song for charitable purposes. Jobson said that he had written the song about the death of a friend in the British Army. Much of Scared to Dance features local references, and also Jobson's fascination with the two world wars.
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Ian Rankin, OBE, DL , is a Scottish crime writer. His best known books are the Inspector Rebus novels. He has also written several pieces of literary... criticism. He attended Beath High School, Cowdenbeath. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he moved to Tottenham, London for four years and then rural France for six while he developed his career as a novelist. He was a Literature tutor at the University of Edinburgh, where he retains an involvement with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The 'standard biography' of Rankin, a Scot, states that before becoming a full-time novelist he worked as a grape-picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist, college secretary and punk musician. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Miranda and their two sons Jack and Kit. Rankin did not set out to be a crime writer. He thought his first novels Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek were mainstream books, more in keeping with the Scottish traditions of Robert Louis Stevenson and even Muriel Spark . He was disconcerted by their classification as genre fiction.
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