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.

(F.H. Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882-4); © 2004 Gazetteer for Scotland)