Like most Glaswegians, I never knew any miners.

It was not a career folk in the West End aspired to when trying to work out what to do after school. It is true that middle-class Jordanhill is an old mining village, and you can still see the original miners' cottages huddled beside the grander semi-detached villas. But the nearest the present owners would get to a pick-axe is when they hire someone to build a patio.

Outside Glasgow it was different. Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, Fife and Stirlingshire all held rich seams of coal which fuelled the industrial revolution. But the miners lived in their own villages clinging at the rural sides of the mines. They had their own clubs and pubs and rarely had the need or desire to travel to Glasgow for a night out.

Then came the miners' strike thirty years ago, and the names of mines we had never heard of were in the headlines, including Polmaise in Stirlingshire beside the village of Fallin. It was one of the first to go on strike during that industry-changing dispute, and one of the last to go back. The fight was lost, the pit was eventually closed, hundreds of jobs were lost, and Fallin slowly morphed into an unremarkable commuter village.

Thirty years on though that dispute is remembered at the Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling where an exhibition of the struggle to save the pit is on display, with banners from the marches now hanging from the ceiling, and miners' lamps, plates and pit towels evoking another era. As one former miner remarked as he tried to make sense of it all: "Somehow it seems like history, but we were all part of it."

Most poignant of all is a map showing the coal board's plans to link up Polmaise with an underground route to the Longannet power station which would have been built in 1991, but all that was swept away as new coal board bosses deemed the plans were no longer viable. There are also the small triangular and circular metal colliery checks which were handed to the miners so that a check was kept on how many people were underground. They were numbered which would help identify bodies if there was an accident. Let's not forget that in its 83 years, 55 miners lost their lives in Polmaise.

Former Labour MP Dennis Canavan, lately a leader of the Yes campaign in the Scottish referendum, opened the exhibition. Although from mining stock in Cowdenbeath, he admits that he had never been down a mine until he stood for the seat of West Stirlingshire. "I ended up crawling for votes quite literally be going down in Polmaise It was pretty frightening crawling along the coalface. I'll never forget it. It was claustrophobic and the noise of the machinery was deafening. I won the seat by only 367 votes so without the support of the miners my parliamentary career wouldn't have got off to a start."

He reminisces about Mick McGahey, the late leader of the National Union of Mineworkers in Scotland, whose gruff, rasping voice sometimes hid his great sense of humour and intellect. Like many Communists of his era, Mick was an avid reader of history and politics, and could hold his own in any argument.

Recalled Dennis: "Mick told the story that whenever there was a dispute, the miners at Polmaise always gave their backing to the union with a vote of nearly 100% in favour which was high even for the NUM. So Mick says he went to the union office at Polmaise to find out why. In there he was told it was like the House of Commons where they have the Aye and the No lobby. On the desk in the union office was a ballot box with Yes written on it. 'Where's the box for a No vote?' asked Mick looking round.

'Tap o' the bloody bing.' he was told."

Former miners attend the opening of the exhibition. One spots a colleague in a photograph. "Look," he nudges him. "You've got hair there." The ex miners still stand out as proud men with a rugged strength we office workers never acquire. As Dennis Canavan put it: "I have never believed that all miners are angels. But their history in the main is of good, honest, hard-working men who crawled through the bowels of the earth to service the energy needs of the country."

It is a shock to remember the powers that the police were given then. A busload of striking miners from Polmaise was simply stopped on the road to Hunterston power station where they were going to picket and all were charged with conduct likely to lead to a breach of the peace. Yes, arrested for simply sitting on a bus.

Driving to London for a football match I and three friends in a car were pulled off the motorway by a police patrol car during the miners' strike. We were quizzed on whether we were miners with the implication that we would be turned back if we were. But presumably one look at us convinced the officers we were hardly sons of toil and we were allowed to continue.

Newspaper colleagues who were sent to cover the picketing at the Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire could not believe the level of violence as thousands of police and miners charged each other on a field like a mediaeval battle. It really does seem a different time compared to today's laws where six is the maximum number of pickets.

The displays at the Smith Gallery include comments from former miners. As James Armitage pondered: "There's more coal still down there than was ever taken out in the pit's history. I believe that one day the coal will be mined again. Probably not in my lifetime and probably not by conventional means, but oil will run out."

Coal miners return in a future Scotland. Nice to think you could be right James.