Blog at the Ballast

The Lord of the Isles II was a paddle steamer built by D & W Henderson, Partick in 1891. She was owned by the Glasgow & Inverary Steamboat Company and put on the Glasgow to Inverary route to replace the Lord of the Isles I.She was scrapped in 1928 after serving on the following routes: Glasgow to Lochgoilhead, Glasgow to Bute cruises and...

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The Ballast Trust is supported in what it does by the work of its volunteers. Without them it would be very difficult for us to make sense of the material we work with.At the beginning of the year the National Council on Archives carried out a survey of volunteers in archives, which 3 of the volunteers with the Trust completed surveys for. Because...

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I have limited resources today so cannot upload any new photos for the Friday photo post. Instead I thought I would focus on the picture used in the header for the blog. This is a picture of several cranes outside (I think) what is now BAE System in Govan. The yard itself was founded in the 1860s by Randolph, Elder & Co and...

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The Aberdeen built ships project aims to make information about Aberdeen's shipbuilding heritage accessible to the widest possible audience through their website (here).They have also started series of podcasts to act as an introduction to the collections held by the Aberdeen Maritime Museum. You can subscribe to the feed here.I'm personally a big fan of all things web 2.0 and I think this...

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The Dan McDonald collection was acquired by Bill Lind on 6th March 1996 and processed at the Trust by 1997. The following text has been taken from the introduction to the catalogue and provides an explaination by Bill of how the collection was processed and what was known about it.Unfortunately, no form of negative register or other record was available, which might have...

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This weeks photo is of fishing boats from Carradale, Kintyre moored in front of George V bridge in Glasgow. It was taken on 1 April 1939. ...

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Dan McDonald was born in the parish of Kingston on the South bank of the Clyde on 13th November 1899 - a product of the “Gay Nineties” as he liked to recall. At that time, Kingston was a thriving community of working class Highland and Lowland country Scots, who had migrated to Glasgow in search of respectable employment, with a goodly number being...

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The Dan McDonald collection that the Ballast Trust owns comprises of over 5,000 of Dan McDonald's negatives. It contains images of puffers, steamers, fishing vessels, yachts and also several views of coastal towns and harbours. The catalogue is available online from our website here. The catalogue has been arranged as follows: Section 1. Miscellaneous Vessels 1930-1980. Comprises a list of all types of...

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The first photograph in our weekly series is of the Robert the Bruce a paddle driven ferry operating between North and South Queensferry from the 1930s to 1964.This was one of four ferries which operated the route and had been built by Denny's shipyard in 1934. The ferry crossing became redundant with the opening of the Forth Road Bridge in 1964. ...

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The Ballast Trust has a collection of photographs and negatives taken by Dan McDonald and bought by Bill Lind.Dan McDonald was a puffer enthusiast who took photographs of puffers along with other boats and harbours across Scotland but mainly on the West Coast.To share the collection more widely I plan to do a weekly post about one of the photographs with a little...

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