Methil Power Station

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Methil Power Station 1 (by Ben Cooper)

Methil Power Station is a coal-slurry power plant built in 1965 on the coast of Fife where the River Leven joins the sea. Coal slurry is the low-grade byproduct of coal washeries, consisting of mainly coal dust and water. Methil’s two 30MW generating units were specially built to burn this slurry, which came from the neighbouring Fife coalfields by road and rail. Google’s aerial imagery shows the rail lines which have now been ripped up.

As the Fife coalfields closed, supplies of the slurry dried up, and the plant closed in the mid ’90s – a brief trial using one generating unit to burn refuse for power wasn’t a success. The plant is now scheduled for demolition. Continue reading →

ICI Nobel Explosives

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The Ardeer peninsula in Ayrshire is basically a gigantic sand dune – it was chosen by Alfred Nobel in 1871 as the site for his British Dynamite Factory because of it’s remote location and lots of sand to make protective berms and blast walls. It soon grew into the world’s largest explosives factory, making explosives for mining and quarrying, and expanding into other explosives and propellants for both civilian and military uses.

Nobel Explosives became part of ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) in 1926, but production shifted away and the Ardeer plant diversified into other non-explosive products, and unfortunately these didn’t do very well – much of the site is now derelict.

I’ve visited the southern shore-facing part of Ardeer before, but this visit was to investigate the northern section. First up was an interesting building on the satellite views which I knew from other sites was probably a drum mill for milling explosive powders – after poking about in the dense woodland, I found it:

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Carrongrove Power Station

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This is one of those places that I’ve known about for ages, but I always seemed to be passing on a weekday when the site was busy – so, hearing that demolition was imminent, I headed out before dawn on Easter Sunday to finally have a look around.

Paper mills have been sited on the River Carron for over 200 years, and two earlier mills at Carrongrove dated back to at least 1840. I’m not sure when the latest mill dated from, but some construction pictures date from 1910. The mill was bought by Inveresk (owners of Caldwell’s Mill in Inverkeithing, previously reported on) in 1924, but it was caught up in the same downturn in the paper market, and closed at the end of 2005.

A planning proposal was submitted in 2006 to demolish the mill and built a housing development, and the mill itself is now all gone. What remains is the power station – a paper mill requires as much power as a small town, so a two-boiler coal-fired power station was built on the site. It’s a lovely little power station, quite home-made in places compared to a big power station like Inverkip, but that adds to the charm.

This is the view from outside:

Carrongrove 39 (by Ben Cooper)

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Barnton Quarry Bunker

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It’s not what you expect to find in Scotland’s capital city, right next to the zoo – A WWII and Cold War bunker complex in the middle of a golf course. Barnton Quarry produced high quality building stone up until about 1914, before being abandoned. Then, during in WWII, a large surface complex of buildings was built to act as the Operations Room for the Turnhouse Sector of RAF Fighter Command.

The main Ops Room:

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