I finally worked out how to stitch lots of images together properly and make an explorable panorama – great for letting you see all around somewhere 🙂 Click on the pictures to open the panoramas -they’re QuickTime files, and they’re about 4Mb each. Then just use your mouse to drag the view about…
Another batch of pictures from this massive explosives factory. The full history of Bishopton is covered in my previous report, and in much more detail in my book Explosive Scotland.
First up, the Factory I guncotton plant – These beaters were used to chop up the nitrocellulose slurry:
It’s been, ooh, 15 minutes since I last did a report on this place 🙂 Sadly, it now looks as if this place doesn’t have much longer…
Firstly the WWII-era Cordite press houses – this part is very torn up, looks like for buried electrical cable and scrap, very smashed up but still some lovely details left, like this Tangye press:
I just can’t keep away from this place – this was another quick revisit to poke about the labs again, and find yet more plans – plus, in a drawer in a darkroom, some glass slides of ICI workers.
A fun stroll in the woods, with some friends – big concrete things, little machine things, secret paths and comedy “run away!” moments – what more could you want?
I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking when the hell am I going to STFU about Ardeer? Soon, I promise 😉 This was a revisit to walk the last few unexplored paths, go into every building I’ve missed, and hunt down a few loose ends – plus get better pictures of some places for my book project. There were a few bonuses, though…
First up, one of the four gunpowder presses – GP4 is a “Yankee” horizontal hydraulic press, which was apparently preferred by the workers.
Going through all my Bishopton pictures for my book, I found another stash of images – with all the fuss about the police etc I’d put them in a different folder and forgot about them. So here’s a kind-of mini report:
This is one of the Bertrams beaters used to pulp guncotton:
Another visit back to the enormous Ardeer site, this time to have a look around the wooded area that contained the gunpowder works. First, though, I passed through the nitroglycerin section – it’s a bizarre landscape of steep hills, tunnels, berms and these corrugated-iron blast walls:
A third visit, this time from a different direction. This is Africa House, it was the South African pavilion at the Glasgow Empire Exhibition, moved to Ardeer to be used for offices, but now a gutted wreck:
