Yup, I've had a good look over on that side of the site - it's not as well preserved as the peninsula side, though.
The brick buildings with the lovely lattice walls are acetone recovery houses, used as part of the cordite manufacturing process. Gunpowder was never manufactured on that side as far as I know, it was all cordite propellant for WWII. The long bunkerlike buildings with the Chilworth mounds (the corrugated iron blast walls) are cordite press houses - each bay held a press where cordite paste was extruded through a die to produce rods which were chopped up and bundled together to make the propellant charge.
I don't have a detailed map of the site, best I have is a rough plan of the factory areas in an RCAHMS book. Something to work on
The smaller ones i.e. with the 3 escape doorways do not seem to have been used for production as they are one big room often with yellow rectangular areas marked out on the floor. Looks like batch storage to me.
The longer buildings do seem to be for production. I did note that the surviving wooden door were covered with zinc sheeting on the inside and that they had spyholes in them.
There was a slight solventy smell in the brick building I visited. I assume that coke must have played some part in the acetone recovery process.
According to the Dalbeattie description, the acetone recovery was by distillation which it refers to as a gentle heating process by radiators mounted on the walls, and refers to the piping involved in carrying the vapour containing the acetone to be recovered, plus nitroglycerine as a by-product - an unwanted explosive by-product, less volatile than acetone, but probably vaporised due to relatively poor temperature control.
It notes the nitroglycerine condensed around joints in the pipework, and that a worker manually drained it off periodically.
If coke of the solid fuel has been found lying around, then it would more likely have been for boilers/heaters to heat the water circulating in the radiators of the acetone recovery house.
The description lead to two suggested process and a pic of a still, which would have wanted a little heat as well.
Unfortunately, our fine Scottish education system denied me any chemistry education whatsoever - no teachers in stock during the years they were needed, it's the one thing I grudge the system for - so I can't have a stab at the usefulness of carbon/coke in the recovery process, but it doesn't look too likely as the process refers to the use of solutions to process the distillate chemically.
The zinc sheeting might have been to stop the doors splintering in the event of an explosion, and/or help keep the lower production area gas/vapour-tight. Presumably the acetone would saturate and penetrate the wood, making into an explosion or fire waiting to happen if a light or similar came near to the door, with potentially disastrous consequences.
I think the fact that The Fox could still detect the remaining odour from the process after all the years that have passed with the house lying open speaks volumes for the level of vapour saturation that must have existed within when they were in operation.
I have added some pegs to the map but am having trouble with Picassa which is refusing to save captions.
I am sure, having read the Dalbeattie pages, that the buildings either side of the Acetone Recovery building are for drying and not extrusion as the detail of the zinc lined doors and the pics of vent pipes seem the same.
I didn't explore much of it as you can see but the adjoining areas seem to be carbon copies of the area explored and the site has many internal fences with locked gate running across it. I expect to get back at some future date even if I have to wade through knee deep water to get onto the site ( a section of the road appears to have subsided). I did get out with dry feet via the railway siding but had great difficulty finding a path from there to the bridge under the railway.
On the aerial to the south of the explored area there appears to be a line of 4 or 5 buildings in the woods. These appear to be extant but buried with earth and greatly over grown. It would be nice to know what they were and why they have been buried.
The coke remains a mystery. I don't go with the theory of it being boiler fuel - no sign of a boiler and acteone is just a teenzy bit explosive. The stills would have been heated with steam from the power building on the other side of the river - we would not, I think, be talking about very high temperatures. There are cut off steel stanchioons that could have supported stills or other machinery but the large number of concrete bases is puzzling as many seem to have been associated with drive shafts apparently powered by something in the small annexe to the NW side of the building.
The markers begin to help make sense of the layout of the site.
Can I ask that when they are being gathered, they are placed on the corners of the items they belong to?
The current code doesn't allow the option of hiding the markers, an it's a shame to lose sight of part of the very subject they are drawing attention to, if they are on top of it and obscuring some of the detail
(I'll mive them later, as I may be fiddling with "Australia").
The Australian marker may have to go as well - unfortunately, although the coding is smart enough to pick a zoom level for the view such that all the markers are shown, this doesn't count as an advantage when there is a local cluster, such as at Ardeer, and one on the opposite side of the planet. Although the zoom can be over-ridden, the calculated centre can't be, and still centres on the average. The only way to eliminate the Australian effect is to remove the marker from the set.
There is an as yet unused option to have more than one map embedded in a page, but I think it failed to work fully when I tested it once, and may either be incomplete, or not properly incorporated in the otherwise stable code version in use. There are later versions with more toys, but I don't like to chance them if we don't need them and their additional complexity.
(There's also a new version of the Google Map code just released, which will probably mean revision in future, as they will eventually drop the current version in favour for the new one, but it is only out of the box, and although faster than the present one, lacks many of its function, so is not yet a replacement/upgrade option).
I agree on the heating, but its odd having the coke there. The temperatures involved are indeed low, and using the word boiler conjures up images of steam boilers, but the description gave the clue as it mentioned radiators on the wall, so it would be little more than a glorified central heating system, but on an industrial scale. If - and I emphasis that if - there was such a thing, it might have been to let acetone recovery work in isolation, and there would have been little hazard, since all that would be sent into the house would have been the warm water for the radiator - but then again, I'm only having a little ramble around the coke
The other clever thing is that the acetone recovery plant is in the centre of a quite large space between two drying sheds and these are constructed with the sloping earth covers towards the recovery unit. In the event of a nasty the force of the explosion would not damage the drying sheds and would be diverted upwards avoiding a chain reaction round the site.
As you will have seen in the pics there is a lot of it inside the shed and even more dumped outside it.
Sorry about the pegs I must remember to put them at the top of the artefacts in future.
A second map would be good if it could be achieved - it would allow pictures to be mapped without interfering with anything else.
Scrub the two+ map idea, after a lot of frantic typing the reward was only confirmation that no-one has ever got round to adding any of the required code.
I've killed the Australian factory point for the moment, so the view centres on Ardeer, as this is the core subject.
(I always intend to look at the later version of this code, but since I had a minuscule hand in writing this mod, my own version is possibly compromised with customisations and tests, and I've never felt brave enough to try updating, in case something I still have written in is important, and I kill the maps by changing that section. Have to do it one day though )
The peninsula is mainly now owned by npl developments, but there is still very much and active area ( Chemring/Quinetiq). I personally worked in the nitrocellulose indusrty that was there. Left about 2 year ago due to confirmed rumours that the work was off out to Thailand. The NC side of the plant is now mothballed or taken over by the companies on site. I was onsite (due to my new employment, not willing to disclose exacty what that is openly here but will say I get to visit some very interesting places) and can say there has been a considerable upgrade in the security around the active site. This is probably due to a combination of the fire/arson a few years ago and fact industry left is explosives.
As for areas there is loads out there, have to remember site has been active since the 1870's. Some ground work was attempted but failed as no true soil samples could be found in some areas due to hitting rubble!
Specific things from previous posts. Posts are indeed lightning conductors, they are located on the corners of the bunkers. These bunkers to my knowledge are used for storage and test firings. They have solid walls and a canvas roof, designed as such so if it does go bang the force of the explosion goes out by the route of least resistance( the roof) and so reduce the amount of flying debris.
The structures on other side of river visible from the rail line were old magazines.
Site of nylon plant is roughly now where BPI industries are located, also to the north side outside the active area is the old dynamite plant. Personally never ventured there (yet).
Large structures visible are the powerstation chimneys, one active other mothballed, and the "maggies" magnesium nitrate stacks for acid reclamation ( quite a view from up top of these).
Dunno if anything I have said is useful but if there is questions I can help with then feel free to ask
There is two. The red brick one up beside the "maggies" is mothballed and probably suffering a level of dereliction through negligence. The other, grey building beside medical block, is fully active
I don't know if it's relevant, but I have the Stenlake Publishing book "Ayrshire's Last Days of Steam", and the ICI siding that comes off the Irvine-Kilwinning railway was known as Snodgrass Junction, apparently named after a long gone local farm. There are also rumours of a second platform station at the end of this siding.
Does anyone here know if any part of the Nobel/ICI complex ever came under the name of Bowhouse?
If you select the People's Map link on our Secret Scotland - ICI Ardeer page, and use the Layers option found near its top right corner to switch to the Out of copyright layer, you will be able to find the Snodgrass spur leading to a coal-pit, which is presumably how it came into being - it's just to the east and a bit south of our yellow marker which shows on that map.
Had a look around for any Bowhouse hints nearby, but I couldn't spot anything obvious.
If you select the People's Map link on our Secret Scotland - ICI Ardeer page, and use the Layers option found near its top right corner to switch to the Out of copyright layer, you will be able to find the Snodgrass spur leading to a coal-pit, which is presumably how it came into being - it's just to the east and a bit south of our yellow marker which shows on that map.
Had a look around for any Bowhouse hints nearby, but I couldn't spot anything obvious.
The one that is still existing to a certain extent, and there are photographs of on the main page is the Snodgrass Junction. The pic I have on that Ayrshires Last Days of Steam book shows a small steam loco with a train of explosives (If I remember right) from that section. There were probably a few other small lines in this area as well. With all the collieries and iron works, Ayrshire I think was festooned with small scale sidings.
I have to say that I was a bit surprised at the short length of the Snodgrass siding - it must be about 100yds only. The buffers look as if they have been there for a considerable time and all the sleeper castings I saw said LMS. There is also the missing 5 feet of rail near to the main line. There was no sensation of walking on old sleepers as I walked up the track but on giving it further thought a coal fired steam engine would not be something you would want in the grounds of an explosive factory. I assume the internal narrow gauge diesel powered rolling stock carried the product to the siding for transfer to the main line train.
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