I found four of these trenches in a wood at Nitshill today. They are about 6 feet wide. Two were quite short, probably about 30 feet one was much longer and the 4th enormous. It must have been getting on for 100 yards long. There may well be more but the area is thickly wooded. There are also areas which have been cleared with the earth banked up at each side. They are about 12 feet wide and 30 feet long. The trench walls are made of stone blocks rendered with what looks like lime render.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/TheFoxSecS/Nitshill

Not a clue, but would need bit of a hint as to where the spot is.

Well anything to oblige   (:gma-point lat=55.7963117 lon=-4.3439341
(:mlat:55.7963117(:mlon:-4.3439341(:mngr6:NS531583

From the location, I'd be tempted to suggest something to do with the reservoir and waterworks, which date back to the turn of the century.

That row of blocks along the bottom edge of one of the trenches looks very like a method of horisontal pipe support I've seen elsewhere.

Is that a broken piece of Victorian cast iron on a vertical wall in one of the pics?

I don't think it anything to do with the Gorbals' Waterworks. Our friend R lists a lot of bits and pieces relating to that subject.   The only other thing they have in that area which J.Guy has listed is a rifle Range poss WWI, and his report does allude to bits in the woods.  It is hard to know how deep these trenches are as they are all fillled or silted up to a greater or lesser degree but my best guess is something between 12 and 15 feet.  The only iron work found was a few remaining steel brackets at the top of one of the top walls and the bit of apparently victorian cast iron.  My guess is that is was a hand operated water pump, possibly semi rotary to bail out the sumps as in a ROC Post.   Below it is a rising pipe and above and to the right a hole in the wall posssibly for a discharge pipe.  The long trenches have had them at the closed end as well as the open end whereas the short ones only had one at the open end.  The very log trench had an alcove in the wall at about the midpoint and some stones set as castellations on top.  The rest were plain.

Two words of warning to anyone who fancies a visit.  This is definitely a drought conditions explore as the depth of the soft silt is unknown, and 2 the woods are infested with tics.

The access road for the site comes off of the road to the waterworks to the west.  It is made of gravel and has a WWII look about it.  I am wondering if the site was reused in WWII for a purpose other then the one it was constructed for.

You'll be wanting this past thread then  

Thanks but no thanks.  Thanks to years of cutting grass I have had almost as many tics as many people have had fish suppers!

Just perused Old-maps.  These would appear to be the remains of an elaborate Rifle and pistol range dating back to between 1867 and 1898!  This fits in with J Guy's explanation except that they are much older than WWI and seem to have had 8 targets at one point.  Given the length of these trenches they must have been able to  have a lot of men firing at once.

So far so good but this does not explain the bulldozed areas in the woods or the access road from the west which does not seem to bo on the old maps.  I wonder if they were re-used later for a different purpose.

I you didn't find it already, although this is marked on the 'old-map' as Patterton Rifle Range (yes, I did have a look), it seems to have changed its name, at least as far as the railways are concerned:

• The station was originally opened as part of the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire Railway on 1 May 1903. It closed on 1 January 1917 due to wartime economy, and reopened on 1 February 1919 as Patterton for Darnley Rifle Range (sometimes referred to as simply Patterton for Darnley). It was renamed back to Patterton by British Rail.
  

They didn't have a lot of men firing at once in those days! The hardware was so hopeless in terms of accuracy they had to have big targets to give them a chance of hitting something

I'd hoped to trawl up something more definitive online, but it looks like all we'll be having is the pics and the fact that they exist, and were on the early maps.

Guess I won't be able to pass this off as waterworks related

You have slightly jumped the gun on this as the pics are still in their raw state but I'll get round to giving them captions.  There is also the question of whether the site was used in WWII.  The thread on hiddenglasgow suggests that they were used for munition storage at that time.   Now I am sure that My Father once said when we were stopped in a line of traffic that there were hundreds of tons of ammuniton stored on the hilllside.  I have been looking for any backup on this but cannot find anything (so far).

I have added a few more pics to the Gallery and they now have captions which might help people to understand what they are looking at.

The WWII ammo storage is also mentioned on hiddenglasgow.

There is an RCAHMC report although the info is incorrect and the marker in the wrong place.

Can you say which record?

The record listed on our page is fine - if speculative - and the position is fine so far as surveyed grid refs go.

I'm sure I did actually find a record, maybe the same one as you are referring to, and it was so crazy I dismissed it, but I did it so quickly I can't remember anything about it, other than the "Oops, this is a waste of time!" bit.

Again, purely in rambling mode, it seems fair to assume that since the reservoir and wet bits were probably always there, it's not exactly the obvious choice where one would want to keep munitions, not wanting to get one's 'powder' wet, or anything else for that matter, for fear of mould, oxidisation etc. Materiel was natural in those days, and not the resilient synthetic stuff of today's army.

The dam and filters are certainly above the level of these trenches but the lie of the land suggests that in the case of a breach the spillage would be well to the west of them.

Remember Dugald going on about nissen huts of shells all over the country?  This would seem to be an ideal place for an ammo store.    Before D Day they had to stockpile thousands/millions of shells.  I'll look at the linked RCAHMS and get back to you.

The rcahms linked page is the only one I can find on Canmapping.  I am probably mistaken but I thought the record I read before I set off was from J.Guy!  I am sure it was longer and referred to it as having WWII use but probably dated to WWI.  The map point was in the field below the wood.
Incidentally the rcahms record we have is for a firing trench which these definitely are not.  Not that is unless the soldiers each had a ladder to stand on.  I didn't look at the bottom of the field where the firing trenches should be.

We may both be wandered

I'm sure there was something else, and the point was nowhere in sight of the real place - either that, or I've mixed it up with somewhere else. Only problem with that is that I haven't been hunting in Glasgow for anything else at the moment.

Remember the hg thread spoke of firestep for the shooters to stand on, which would have meant they could walk without having to remember to stoop to stop losing the top of their heads! Thee may also have been duckboards down there too, given the suggestion of sump pumps, and the simple fact that the trenches wouldn't have drained on their own, being dug below ground level.

I wasn't thinking of spillage - if that land's wet today, and you think it worth warning visitors to go in times of drought, you can bet it was no better in the past.

I visited a field in Forth (towards Edinburgh) near a place called Climpy, the first time I went there I had to wear wellies - just to make it through the "driest" part. I think it was autumn, just after a nice hot dry summer. When I revisited in late spring, I expected it to be worse after the thaw and early rain. I was more than surprised to find the place bone dry with firm ground. Not even the coos were making an impression! There's just no logic to this land thing, you need to be a local, with local knowledge.

Don't know if you tried matching the 1954 hg pic to the present day view, but it's interesting to see that the ranges have gone completely by that time, and that a large trench to the east has gone, and the M77 all but shoots through the the main eastern part of the former range site.

The trenches are shown on the old maps as targets which makes sense as they are higher than the area where the shooting would have taken place.  In the absence of any machinery appart from the wall brackets I assume that the targets were on poles .  This ties in with the castellations as the targets could have been moved from behind the stone blocks until they became visible.

My warning is not about the surrounding area which seems quite normal farm land but the interior of the trenches as even after all the dry weeks we have had was often very soft underfoot.  In fact I gave up exploring the interior of the vary long one as it was particularly soft.  As I have said I have no idea how deep it is and there may well be deeper sumps under it that will always be damp.

Strange that you seem to remember another report too.  Maybe they are reading the Forum too!

Quoted from The Fox

Remember Dugald going on about nissen huts of shells all over the country?  This would seem to be an ideal place for an ammo store.    Before D Day they had to stockpile thousands/millions of shells.  I'll look at the linked RCAHMS and get back to you.

Fox, the open-ended nissen huts of shells which I saw all over the country were really restricted to around the Trossachs area and the Braes o' Greenock. I may have seen some around the back roads of Bishopton but i'm not sure. i did see lots of military vehicles, and i did see crated aeroplanes parked on the grass along the Edinburgh Rd.

I've been following the discussion of the trenches around Nitshill with interest. I knew this area quite well having spent a lot of time in and around the village during the war, but i don't ever recall seeing shell-storage nissan open-ended huts... never ever saw or heard of these trenches before either. The only things military I ever saw around Nitshill were Yankee soldiers from the Cowglen hospital or the Crookston army camp. Oh yes, there was a mental hospital near the Hurlet and I spoke several times with a French soldier who was stationed at this hospital.

To go back to Apollo's post - I must be slow tonight, it took a while for the hg penny to drop.  The 1954 pic is interesting and probably the best view we will ever have of the Patterton POW Camp.  It certainly looks as if everything else bar the trenches had been removed from the ranges by then.

Dugald - I wasn't particularly suggesting that there were open Nissen huts there merely using them as an example of how every possible ammo storage area had to be used in the buildup to D.Day.  I see someone on the thread says there were similar trenches in Beith Depot used for that purpose.

As  an aside most of the dams are empty at present for maintenance and I was amazed at the thousands of dead freshwater mussel shells lying on the beach and at the size of them.

Aah - excellent. Came across these when taking a shortcut back from B&Q to the reservoirs (more a wtf is that trench doing here) when walking the dogs. Been meaning to get bqack there with a camera and tape measure to do a proper survey. Nice one.