Blog at the Ballast

Today's photo is a lighter built by J & J Hay of Kirkintilloch called DRUID.Hay built two lighters called Druid, one in 1899 and one in 1905. This picture is of the later one and the specifications details of it can be found on the Clydebuilt site here. ...

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Friday photo is not changing to puppy of the week but it so happens that today's choice of ship shares its name with a breed of terrier - the Dandie Dinmont. The dog breed is named after a "jovial farmer" who appears in the Walter Scott novel Guy Mannering, perhaps the ship was too...Regardless, it is now my new favourite name for a...

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Our Volunteer Policy was approved by the Trustees yesterday so we now have an official statement of what we can offer volunteers and what we would expect from them.We're very fortunate to have three great volunteers already at the Trust who between them must know everything there is about railways and locomotives. However, we still have plenty of work for new volunteers and...

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A little update on where we are with our archive pace setter scheme project. I posted about it here when we were awarded pace setter status. But I never really explained it on the blog, although the project plan is available on our website here.Basically the project is going to test our use of the Archivists Toolkit (AT) by using it to catalogue...

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Excuse the slightly squint images for today's photo, that's how I put them in the scanner. The images are of the hovercraft/hoverbus built by William Denny & Brothers and launch in 1962. It was one of the last projects the company undertook before they went into liquidation in 1963.Denny's were a firm known for innovation and this hoverbus was one of the first...

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At the Ballast we tend to specialise in large scale industries but tomorrow I will be attending an event that focuses on domestic technologies: sewing machines, woodwork tools, typewriters and blacksmith or cobblers' tools.I will be attending the launch of the STICK Effective Collections project 'Old Tools, New Uses' which is working with museums in Scotland to identify the treasures and duplicates of...

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Another busy week where I haven't been able to get to the scanner to do some new Dan McDonald photos so today there's another from his fishing sets. This shows men attending to their nets in 1939. ...

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