The pics of the predictor etc. are almost certainly from The Illustrated London News as I have a set of early WWII history books which includes quite a few of these pics, including the predictor one and they are all attributed.

The 4 holdfasts are certainly there although I had a job finding them armed just with an OS map and a couple of aerial views.  I was almost about to give up as the grass is mostly about 2 feet high when I almost tripped over the edge of No.4.  Once I had found it and realised I was looking for something 13 feet in diameter ( I did take a tape measure ) and not something 30ft in diameter and related the find to the topography, finding the rest was quite easy.  I have added pictures to the Craigmaddie album.  For some reason the outer shutter on the camera jammed and the pic of holdfast 2 did not come out.

There are signs of a now degraded tarmac road having been constructed running off the main lane opposite the old pit shaft.  Most of it is reclaimed by short grass but it had clear offshoots to each holdfast.

The field also has several roughly circular areas covered in short reeds.  Whether these are natural or remains of yet more unrecorded pit shafts I do not know.

I also located a large concret hut base 16ft wide with one room at 19ft and two at 8ft beside the track to the south of the holdfasts.  I was not able to detect the linear shapes shown in some of the aerial shots due to the length of the grass.  

The ducts in the holdfasts suggest that the  Control Building would have been in the usual place relative to the holdfasts if it had been built but I could not find any signs of construction.  Could still be hidden in the grass though.   I feel quite sure that this is a battery that was started but never finished and could well be one of the 2 missing ones. Talking of which, are the NGRs you have converted from the original grid to the new one?  OS changed the grid in the 50s I seem to remember and this can give an error of a couple of miles.

I also photographed what seems to have been a replacement (duplicate) road up to the decoy area.  The new one has a better turn in.  It, and the original seems to be constructed in degraded tarmac. The road up past the decoy turns right (east) at the top of the hill. Buildings on aerial pics are an old farmstead and I found no brick or concrete remains.  The road is covered with the same degraded tarmac all the way to the edge of the wood.

As the road runs up/down the hill there are ditches both sides but in the field beside the road there are 2 sewage or other traps or pipe connection traps.  This may suggest some kind of accomodation camp near the top of the hill to the west of the decoy.

On some of the aerial pics there are 3 or 4 circular areas with trees which COULD have been interesting but unfortunately the field has been cleared and regraded.  One of the aerial pics shows what looks like an enclosure in this field but the other do not.  I have no idea where the artifact came from.

Having looked at the site again I am fairly sure that the western control bunker had nothing to do with the decoy we have identified here, it is too far away.

Which NGRs are you asking about? I'll guess the two lost gun sites.

It doesn't matter if you are referring to anything on SeSco, as all co-ordinates are WGS84 and intended for use with GPS devices, to make life easy for anyone using them. Apart from, they have to be WGS84 to work with the embedded Google map!

All grid references are converted to the present day WGS84 datum - if an OSGB36 reference is ever given, it should be marked as such, or be obvious by date, as much to avoid me getting lost with it, and to help anyone else (but I can't guarantee that absolutely, as some of the earliest pages were begun for my own use, and left in place as more was added, and it seemed silly to delete them).

The error arising from the wrong datum is most certainly not 2 miles! It varies, and varies with time too (the datum is actually drifting as we type, 10 cm per annum I think, and there will need to be another change at some time), but is of the order of 100 metres, as shown below. The scale line shown reads 0.046 km:



I tend not to get caught out now (but still do sometimes) because the original info for all the ROC posts is OSGB36, but nobody mentioned, so muggins started off wandering around fields 100 metres off target - not much good given those figure were MK I eyeball surveys, and could easily be at least that far off the intended location anyway.

It was just a thought given the age of the sites.  Are you sure that the source of the original data hadn't forgotten to transpose them?

Cheers for the photos, Fox. I sent a report form to the RCAHMS  and got a reply this morning. They're going to update the CANMORE entry.
This was definitely a dummy AA battery, as they have lists of those proposed and those actually built, and this one doesn't appear on either. There is a dummy battery at Millershill in Edinburgh (NT37SW586) and the concrete and brick buildings are every bit as solid as the real thing. There was also one behind Braefoot Plantation in Dalgety Bay which was little more than turf walls with telegraph poles, so this one seems to fall in between the two. They note the cropmarks I mentioned at Blairskaith, but point out that the area around the holdfasts is full of 18th Lime clamp-kilns built in rows of 4-8, coal or lime pits, and rig and furrow cultivation. Chances are that these were employed as part of the overall decoy plan.
The bomb craters shown on the 1945 photo are actually about 180m east of the Newlands bunker, but the area is now afforested and the chances of finding them are slim.

The original GNG5 and GNG6 'lost' sites came I think, from one of the books listing all the UK sites, and was part of a list of hundreds, and the rest of the location match up to the traditional "stone's throw" with what I have from other sources. There could always be a transcription error in the publication or the transfer to online listing. Not me (in this case) as my listings are taken by scraping the data from the original source, which amount to 'copy & paste'.

I did try scouting around the area views, in case the figures were out by a reasonable amount, but couldn't spot anything good. Then, as we saw above, even with GPS, it's all too easy to slip a figure or two, and unlike lat/lon, dropping a figure in a grid reference means you might as well throw it away.

Going back to Craigmaddie, I feel distinctly uncomfortable calling this a dummy battery, regardless of the RCAHMS propose/actual list.

I can understand constructing emplacements and command posts, but why install the complete holdfast at a time when men and resources were limited? Hardly a detail that would be visible from the air or reconnaissance photos, and even so, a dollop of concrete would have even more than adequate.

Purely my own thought, but with earth and logs good enough in some places?

I've seen Millershill (heck, I've seen them all, but am only making pages for those in my area - somebody from Edinburgh might pick up the others one day) and it's an odd layout too.

I'm with you; I'd rather call them decoy batteries. The logic behind logs and turf decoys was that an aircraft flying at 200-300 mph at low level isn't going to be able to distinguish much detail, and they're not going to make another pass to make sure whether its a real battery or not.
The RCAHMS admitted themselves that they couldn't see these holdfasts on modern aerial views, so what were the chances of a German bomber managing?
It's a strange one; any German flying over the area in daylight would instantly spot it as a decoy, so why bother trying to fool them with a half-built decoy battery on an area which blatantly didn't need  defending?

I agree that this is unlikely to be a dummy battery.  Given that the holdfasts seem to be built to normal standards, i.e. I assume that they are more than a thin skin with bolts and dowel holes added for effect, and the fact that they are 13' in diameter they would be hard to spot from the air!   It all seems too elaborate.  If it was a dummy battery why bother with the 6" wide cable/pipe duct detail.  Nobody would see that from the air.   From what I have seen in aerial photographs and online imagery it is generally shadows that lead your eye to such sites and these have no shadows since they are at ground level.

No it has to be an abandonned partially completed one or one where they demolished the WWII buildings ready for a post war replacement which never got built.  I think this is unlikely as they haven't demolished the control building anywhere else other than at Bellsmyre and it was swalllowed up by the bypass.  The plans for the bypass probably existed before the batttery was modified.

Well there's truth in that. I'd love to get through to the RCAHMS and look at the RAF photos of that area; they might not solve the riddle right away, but they're bound to suggest a few leads.

They will eventually send you 6 to 8 electronically if you request them.

Have you come across any mention of a communication system used in HAA Batteries? I thought I had noted it but cannot find it.  Apparently the angles were fed in to the system rotationally and there was a difference in the gearing at the gun end to do with accuracy?  I wish I could remember the name it sounded electrical.

The location make sense in that it would have been the first battery encountered by the enemy if flying over from Norway, as per the Clydebank Blitz.

Decoy batteries, as opposed to Starfish decoys, were intended to mislead enemy intelligence, and provide false information to aerial surveillance. Decoy batteries only had to be good enough to look real in aerial surveillance photographs, and provide false information regarding location and deployment of batteries. No aircraft would have been flying low enough to see them, or be bothered with them. Bombers would be after their targets, and fighter escorts would be defending against interceptors.

Back into my area again, but thankfully before my time (even though I have had to work on industrial control systems that used them) the device The Fox is trying to recall is the selsyn or syncro.

Fire-control system designs developed during World War II used syncros to transmit angular information from guns and sights to an analog fire control computer, and to transmit the desired gun position back to the gun location. Early systems just moved indicator dials, but with the advent of the amplidyne, the fire control system could directly control the positions of heavy guns.

I don't think either of these were the name I came across.  As I remember it was in a BBC recollection of a site in Orkney but the Beeb was unavailable earlier.  I might try again.

I can't think of anything else, the parts clearly had to be standard where possible, and the syncro was the standard component for many years, due to its robust construction and simplicity. It was subsequently used on all the rotating radars that followed, into the huge arrays of the Cold War and for Air Traffic Control, and was the device used to feed indicators on aircraft, and where the positioning of moving surfaces was involved. Again, the reason being their ruggedness, and lack of complication.

They can also be referred to as resolvers and transducers, but I can't think of any more names, unless they had a nickname, or it was a trade name.

I may come back on that but for the moment.................... Has anyone noticed that at the bottom of the AA Batteries Clyde the battery N5 is labelled Craigmaddie by the Mugdock Website.  I would say this site is really Blairskaith b ut then I am not a local.

Have you noticed that all the battery info that the Mugdock web site used to contain has gone - completely. It used to have an empty heading, but that's evaporated too.

http://www.mugdock-country-park.org.uk/

Maybe it's gone somewhere else, or it wasn't accurate, and ditched.

The naming discrepancies are why that info is only pasted at the bottom of the page, and not included in the summary. Some agrees, but the rest is wandered, so it was just noted, and ignored.

The same list turned up on Hidden Glasgow attributed to Mugdock and the Mitchell Library.  I find it interesting that the name Craigmaddie was on it.  Why pick there?  Was an elderly local in Mugdock involved in the making of the list? In which case was it local knowledge?  We will probably never know and I am not suggesting we do any more with the info unless some further verification turns up but I find it an interesting coincidence.

A further thought to throw in.  The concrete on these bases has very crisp edges and seems to be in generally good condition so it occurs to me that it could have been a postwar battery that never got to completion.

"Have you come across any mention of a communication system used in HAA Batteries? "

Found it at last on the RA website.  The name I was looking for was Mag-slip.

Magslip, that's really trawling the depths of terminology, I don't think I ever came across that being used in the 'real' world, but yes, indeed, it is another name for the beastie - and well tacked down too.

It seems to be the favoured term for the military mind, which is why I probably never, or rarely, ever came across it, and led me to this little gem The Gunnery Pocket Book

Primarily naval, but: The Gunnery Pocket Book, B.R. 224/45, 1945 was created near the end of WW II and therefore represents the peak of British WW II gunnery.

Just to let you know, I got another letter from the RCAHMS today about this site. We've really started something! Enquiries have been made at Kew to trawl the darkest depths of official wartime records, and someone who knows a thing or two about Scottish AA sites is now involved too.
They mentioned  that they have also had correspondence from someone else recently- was it one of you guys by any chance?

Yes it led me to the Gunnnery pocket book too but I could not find a simple explanation as to how it worked or what it's benefits might have been.