AA Battery Mugdock

View over site, toward Glasgow

A World War II anti-aircraft battery was sited to the north of Milngavie, east of Mugdock Wood. Site number N9. Part of the Clyde AA Defences, the site was also known as Mugdock Wood or Mugdock Castle.

Built in 1942, almost a year after the Clydebank Blitz, the battery was equipped with four emplacements, a command post, and an accommodation camp to the south, this was one of many such batteries built around the Clyde Basin to protect towns and factories around Glasgow. Records indicate that the battery was designed to take four 3.7-inch or 4.5-inch guns, but was never armed, completed, or occupied, and that the GL Radar installation was commenced, but not completed.

The nearby Mugdock Wood camp contained a number of concrete bases which would have supported Nissen huts and other larger wooden huts to accommodate the Army units whose job it would have been to man the guns. The battery was made up of men and women, with the men handling the guns and ammunition, while the women operated the predictor, height finder and radar. The huts would have contained showers, baths and sleeping accommodation for up to 70 people, and would have been supplied from a large storage tank nearby, which would have held water pumped from Mugdock Loch. Like the battery, the camp was never completed or occupied, and RAF aerial photographs from 1946 show only one building standing on the site.

Much of the battery survives, together with concrete bases for the camp buildings, further described on the Mugdock Wood Camp page.