Inchgreen is a large drydock in Port Glasgow, on the Firth of Clyde – built to handle the largest ships of the ’60s, it’s still owned by BAE Systems and used occasionally. There are three lovely big level-luffing cranes. I’ve climbed the Inchgreen cranes before, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the images I got shooting handheld, so kept meaning to go back.
The target was the one on the right, built by Arrols. As you can see, this is still a live site, and the cranes were in a different position to last time.
The long climb up:
I remembered that it was a big ladder – what I forgot was the handrails – or lack of them. The mesh platforms up top are two feet wide at their widest, with a handrail on only one side – sometimes. I was, frankly, terrified, but managed a couple of shots:
Then descended…
One final shot of a crane, ‘cos it’s pretty:
PS some historic images of the place:
Confusingly, the cranes have been upgraded I think – these cranes are different.
Fantastic photos. Really like them all. My dad was the maintenance electrician at inchgreen – must show him your pics. He could tell you absolutely everything about them.
That would be very interesting – I found some old newspaper cuttings from when it was being built, and it seems the cranes originally installed were different to the ones there now.
These cranes have been put up for sale by BAE. Gonna be an awful lot of bits when dismantled!
Really? Wow – that’s going to be some job to shift them, and they’re not in the best of condition either…