Blog at the Ballast

This is a picture of Vehicle Ferryboat No. 4 outside A & J Inglis Ltd in Glasgow. I've not had much luck finding out any other information about this so comments welcome. **Update** I've since discovered that this was built by Ferguson Brothers in Port Glasgow in 1938 for the Clyde Navigation Trust.  It was used on the route between Govan and Partick.  More...

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As a recently qualified archivist, one of the things I like most about my job at the Ballast Trust is that I get to think about how the Trust should do everything. This is a great opportunity to start at the beginning and think about access policies, accession databases, forms and cataloguing procedures. However, before I tackled the detail of documenting how we...

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The Ballast Trust is based in Johnstone and has been since 1992 when Bill Lind bought a former furniture factory belonging to James E Robertson & Sons Ltd. Before this, the Trust worked from the Joiners shop at the Kingston Yard of Scott-Lithgows and before that at Malcolms of Brookfield.The original purpose of the site means that we have plenty of room. The...

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This image shows the shipyard of Archibald McMillan & Son at Dumbarton.The ship in the middle of the image is the Kana, built for the Moss Hutchison Line in 1929 to transport cargo.The records of Archibald McMillan & Son are held by Glasgow City Archives. The company was established in 1834 by Archibald McMillan and his son, John, and stopped building ships in...

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These are two images from a ship called Uncle Ned. I chose these images mainly because I liked the look of the figurehead as I was going through potential images for today's post. He's quite a dapper chap. However, when it came to finding out anything about the ship, it was tricky. There was no information on the back of the print except...

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This is a picture of the men unloading whisky from the Pibroch at Bunnahabhain Distillery on Islay in 1952.This is a picture of the first Pibroch, which was built by Scotts of Bowling in 1923. She was commissioned by the Mackie brothers, owner of the White Horse Distillery of Lagavulin and served them and their successors, Scottish Malt Distillers carrying coal and barley...

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