Blog at the Ballast

More supplies we received this week!

This time it was some wonderful moo cards to replenish our stock of business cards and allow us to include all our links on them this time now the website, blog and flickr pages are up and running.

Built by Napier & Miller in Old Kilpatrick, the Eagle III was a paddle steamer launched in 1910 and originally owned by Buchanan Steamers.

In the First World War she was used as a minesweeper by Admiralty and in the Second World War took part in the Dunkirk evacuation as HMS Oriole. When interestingly she was deliberately ran aground by her skipper to allow men to board and the vessel to sail away when the tide came in again. See this article in the Herald and this personal recollection by Lt Lindsay who served on her as HMS Oriole.

Full specification details are available here.

On Wednesday our new shelves for the workroom arrived from BiGDUG, I had ordered 18 bays and was expecting them to take up quite a lot of room while we assembled them and cleared some space for them but when they arrived they were all on one pallet like this:

Today's photo is of the Duchess of Fife, a paddle steamer built by Barclay Curle & Co. Ltd in 1903.

Specification details can be found here.

This week we've filled another skip with the last of the dump pile and as you can see several metal filing cabinets which we seem to have stashed everywhere.

There's definitely at least another skip's worth of rubbish to go but there's also quite a few items that we can't use but it would be a shame to throw them out so we'll be trying to find homes for:

Today's photo is a lighter built by J & J Hay of Kirkintilloch called DRUID.