Report - Old site, ICI Ardeer - June 2009

[trogdor]

well having a look on good old google maps i spied a way to some interesting looking bits that was pretty damn easy, just lots of walking!
what it didnt show on google was how overgrown it was

anyway, ardeer has been covered by Mr BenCooper quite well already so im trying to find vaguely interesting bits he hasnt, not easy but il try

first off this is the tiny tiny area i managed to cover - Google Maps
zoom out and you will see the full scale of ardeer! its massive

these bunkers are very well camouflaged and were the bain of the Nazis during the war, they just couldnt find them, no wonder when you get there.

there are about 6 bunkers in this picture
i believe these are old mixing houses, hence the huge blast walls, but its easier to call them bunkers

they are pretty much all carbon copys of one another

and as far as the eye can see
although some blast walls looked a bit blasted

then again might just be my imagination and its just pikeys that gave up trying to nick the steel.
inside

each bunker had about 5 identical little rooms like this

didnt get to search them all as ran out of time and im only 1 guy, but found some interesting looking calculations in one

maybe it was a pikey working out how much a blast wall was worth, couldnt make out the writing
view from the top, from left to right. the gigantic UPM paper mill, rockware glass, magnum leisure centre

only other buildings i got to were 2 drying houses

then the long road home

this one can wait till another day

and past the security horse!

security horse is watching you

in conclusion that part of ardeer is long dead and you can spend a whole day there without being bothered, something i will be doing in the future. i want to search every one of the rooms, must be something interesting there.
if your planning on a trip, might want to bring some wellys most of it seems to be a swamp and required a lot of off roading to get to the bits
watch this space

 

[BenCooper]

Re: old ICI ardeer - JUNE 2009

This website has lots of good stuff on Ardeer, including a long article on how the nitroglycerin hill works:

http://www.threetowners.com/Ardeer Factory/ardeer_factory.htm

 

[trogdor]

Re: old ICI ardeer - JUNE 2009

very interesting stuff, good to have a first hand account of these places. in a convoluted way from your link i found out what the bunkers are

Dalbeattie Domain - Dalbeattie Town and Southern Uplands Server

almost definatly cordite stoving houses, the inside on the one pic i can see in that link is a carbon copy of the ardeer houses. the pipes coming out of the wall were for steam heaters and it even had the remains of the railway
same construction too, lots of little rooms with small amounts of explosives should any one decide to go off.....

also the drying house seems to be an acetone recovery house
Dalbeattie Domain - Dalbeattie Town and Southern Uplands Server
identical construction and in the right location, love this industrial archaeology stuff

also means there must be a boiler house about somewere, try and follow the pipes

 

[Al90]

Re: old ICI ardeer - JUNE 2009

Pictures 1-9 look like explosive drying stoves. The room in pic 8 would have had steam pipes round the walls to dry trays of explosive loaded onto stillages ( compare to Ben Cooper's photo's of the Gun Propellant stoves at Bishopton). Pic 9- It was common to see chalk marks on walls at Bishopton during stock checks - we were not allowed calculators for obvious reasons.