Thornton ( sco, Thorntoun)
/ref> is a village in

Fife Fife (, ; gd, Fìobha, ; sco, Fife) is a council area, historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries with Perth and Kinross (i ...

, Scotland. It is between

Kirkcaldy Kirkcaldy ( ; sco, Kirkcaldy; gd, Cair Chaladain) is a town and former royal burgh in Fife, on the east coast of Scotland. It is about north of Edinburgh and south-southwest of Dundee. The town had a recorded population of 49,460 in 2011, ...

and

Glenrothes Glenrothes (; , ; sco, Glenrothes; gd, Gleann Rathais) is a town situated in the heart of Fife, in east-central Scotland. It is about north of Edinburgh and south of Dundee. The town had a population of 39,277 in the 2011 census, making i ...

, and stands between the River Ore and Lochty Burn, which are at opposite ends of the main street. The

Church of Scotland The Church of Scotland ( sco, The Kirk o Scotland; gd, Eaglais na h-Alba) is the national church in Scotland. The Church of Scotland was principally shaped by John Knox, in the Scottish Reformation, Reformation of 1560, when it split from t ...

parish church was built in 1835 and is located on the Main Street.

Transport

The village has a small railway station, which is called Glenrothes with Thornton. Although situated at the south end of Thornton, it also serves the Glenrothes area. This rail halt was opened in May 1992, restoring a rail service to Thornton lost when its main line railway station closed in October 1969 as a consequence of the 1963 report by Dr

Richard Beeching Richard Beeching, Baron Beeching (21 April 1913 – 23 March 1985), commonly known as Dr Beeching, was a physicist and engineer who for a short but very notable time was chairman of British Railways. He became a household name in Britain in the e ...

on the Reshaping of British Railways (the

Beeching Report Beeching is an English surname. Either a derivative of the old English ''bece'', ''bæce'' "stream", hence "dweller by the stream" or of the old English ''bece'' "beech-tree" hence "dweller by the beech tree".''Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames' ...

). The village is well served by local buses, operated by

Stagecoach Group Stagecoach Group is a transport group based in Perth, Scotland. It operates buses, express coaches and a tram service in the United Kingdom. History Stagecoach was born out of deregulation of the British express coach market in the early ...

in Fife and running between Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes. However, express services between those towns bypass Thornton.

Railways

Thornton Junction railway station was opened in the 1840s on the

Edinburgh and Northern Railway The Edinburgh and Northern Railway was a railway company authorised in 1845 to connect Edinburgh to both Perth and Dundee. It relied on ferry crossings of the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay, but despite those disadvantages it proved extreme ...

. During the first part of the twentieth century, Thornton railway station was situated on the Aberdeen to London main line to the east of the village, at the end of Station Road. To the west, alongside the Dunfermline line, the largest railway marshalling yard in Scotland was built during the 1950s. Though much reduced, this yard is still in use for rail freight services.

Coal mining

In 1957, the Rothes Pit was opened to mine the coal in the rural hinterland surrounding the village. This

coal mine Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

was tied very closely to the development of the postwar new town of

to the north. The planned long-term benefits were to be huge, and were to be the driver for economic regeneration in Central Fife. In 1961, four years after opening, the huge investment was written off and the mine run down because of unstemmable flooding, and closed in May 1962. Ironically, miners who had worked in older deep pits in the area had forewarned against the development of the Rothes Pit for this very reason. The state-of-the art engineering and design was closed, leaving the huge enclosed concrete wheel-towers standing at Thornton for many years as a forlorn symbol of the collapse until 1993, when the towers were demolished.

Sport

The village is home to the

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

club Thornton Hibs who compete in the and play at Memorial Park. In season 2007–08, Thornton Hibs reached the semi-finals of the

Scottish Junior Cup The Scottish Junior Cup is an annual football competition organised by the Scottish Junior Football Association. The competition has been held every year since the inception of the SJFA in 1886 and, as of the 2022–23 edition, 108 teams compete ...

, only to be beaten 3-0 by Cumnock after extra time; the Hibs had been reduced to ten men, losing their goalkeeper, in the 89th minute when the score was 0-0. The village also has its own 18-hole

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

course: https://www.thorntongolfclub.co.uk/ and

bowling Bowling is a target sport and recreational activity in which a player rolls a ball toward pins (in pin bowling) or another target (in target bowling). The term ''bowling'' usually refers to pin bowling (most commonly ten-pin bowling), though ...

club: http://www.thorntonbowlingclub.co.uk/

Culture

The village holds a Highland Games annually every July. Thornton is also the birthplace of Sir George Sharp, a Labour politician who led the battle against local government reforms in the 1970s.

Transport

Railways

Coal mining

Sport

Culture

Other

References

External links