Petrochemicals from Linn Park

[Alycidon]

Nothing showing up on the old maps

1857
http://www.old-maps.co.uk/maptiles/m101288_258178_658923.png

[BTJustice]

If you were to draw a horizontal line from the 490 in the circle towards the river on the map it would be pretty close to this features location.

[moonbeam]

Looks like a bridge for a water pipe, sewage pipe or maybe just a bridge. There was such a structure in Drumchapel
that took water from old mine workings and diverted the water away from a local burn. The local burn was called the healthy burn that did not have the reddish mine water running into it. The remains are on the left side of Peel Glen
Road at the bottom of the hill on the Glasgow boundary. The mine adit is visible full of bright red marshy watery material.
The pipes etc are long gone but the old water channels were still present the last time I looked. You can see it if you go up Peel Glen Road hill about 100 yards and look down to your left. The burn/stream beside it had a sort of dam arrangement. The other sort of pipe I have seen like this delivered mains gas to a farm.

[cell]

Amazing what a few extra pictures and a couple of fresh pairs of eyes will do.

Have to admit from those other pictures it does look like concrete therefore must be newer than a shale gas retort, the killer for me is the similar structure on the other side, I assume this also had a pipe connection facing the other bank? Is the pipe in the main structure a similar diameter to the one coming out of the top?

On the original it’s possible to see some steel work underneath the pipe connection which presumably would be the remains of the structure to support the pipe across the river, was there something similar on the other one?

Doing a bit of reading there seems to have been a history of coal mines and lime preparation in this area so as moonbeam points out it could have been for some mine drainage function. The river itself cuts through coal and shale seams so the lumps in the river bed could just be naturally occurring

I’ve looked at all the available maps and can’t find any record of a pipe bridge, which is a bit strange, I wonder if it shows up in any historic pictures?

This lothttp://www.linnpark.org.uk/ might be worth a contact, they have some good info on the Landscape and Mineral Resources.

[BTJustice]

Cell, the pipe coming from the structure on the opposite bank looked to be the same size but I couldnt get a close look to see if there was steel work remaining as I didnt have my wellies with me.

The pipe isnt too far from the small quarry site, just up the slope so could be related to that, the Linn house or the stables.

The pipe certainly looks to me to be drainage pipe, the same as the cast iron pipes from the gutters on my old flat but draining from where?

If it was coming from the house it would need to be under a lot of pressure to carry it up and over the pipe bridge then up the hill to Netherlee so I am thinking it is a supply going into the park if it is for water.

[BTJustice]

I have been doing a bit of searching on this subject and found this excerpt on this website;

http://www.lp.tdocplus.co.uk/index.php/ ... haite-cart

"Apart from the main Glasgow to Ayr road, there were two local roads through Linn. The first came off the Carmunnock Road at Croftfoot (on the line of present Croftfoot Road). It passed what is now Linn Golf Course club house near Hagtonhill, then round the present driveway to Linn. It continued down by the stables courtyard to the river. The road then forded the Cart upstream of where the Ha’penny bridge would later be built, to Burnside Road at Netherlee. Burnside Road ran along the traditional boundary between Netherlee and Bogton. At the fording point a pipe bridge used to carry a water main across to the park. This was a challenge for local children to cross. The structure deteriorated and was removed in the late 1960’s and a large concrete block on the riverside is all that remains. This ford was forcibly closed in the 1790’s to prevent avoidance of tolls on the main route."

This seems to confirm my observations.

Dave

[Icecube]

Case closed. Well done lads, great investigation.

[Anorak]

Case closed. Well done lads, great investigation.

I'm not so sure!

The civil engineer who runs the tdocplus.co.uk website quoted by BTJustice, (with his profile at http://rgtr.tdocplus.co.uk/), contacted me out of the blue by email yesterday. He seems to have changed his mind after reading my web page!

It appears he has been following the HG thread and wanted to pass on his expert opinion about our mystery structure.

He is part of the team who maintain the “Linn Park, et al” site, http://www.linnpark.org.uk/, (which is a sub-domain of tdocplus.co.uk), and wanted to exchange links with my Cathcart pages, which I have agreed to.

Like the earlier expert quoted by cell, this civil engineer has had previous experience of the shale oil industry in West Lothian, but he also has tremendous local knowledge of Linn Park and Netherlee. I think his opinion carries some weight.

Here is an extract from yesterday's email:




He went out yesterday evening with another engineer to have a look and sent me this message this morning.



Whatever is on the other side of the river seems to be part of the storm drainage system for the houses in First Avenue, Netherlee.

I'm sticking to my original story.
Our mystery structure looks too much like the old diagram of a vertical shale oil retort to be coincidence, being the right size & shape, with all the pipework in the correct positions.

[BTJustice]

It makes no difference to me either way but I will eat my shoe if it turns out to be a retort.

The structure on the netherlee side is the same size, made of the same concrete and has remains of a pipe coming out in exactly the direction of the "retort". If it was related to a storm drain for First ave why is it not a 1/4 mile further upstream where First ave is, why has it no outlet to the river and why is it 8 foot tall?

In the absence of any concrete (pun intended) evidence for it being a retort and with a reference to a pipe bridge being there along with a reason and date for its removal I have to go with it being a pipe bridge.

As I typed earlier in the thread, I would love it to be something special but it just dosnt add up. I look forward to proof that I am wrong but at the moment it is all opinion rather than fact.

Dave

[Lucky Poet]

I'd love to be proved wrong too, but I suspect BTJustice has it.


I lived most of my life two miles from Broxburn and have never seen a retort. I did look quite hard! There are plenty structures by the Union Canal, and many of them to do with the shale oil industry, but retorts they ain't, I'm afraid.

[Anorak]

I was so delighted with yesterday's satisfactory confirmation of shale oil distillation in Linn Park that I went out this morning for a walk along the riverbank for a bit of “shale spotting”. Even after last night's deluge there is lots of the stuff visible above the water level of the fast flowing White Cart.





The civil engineers at docplus.co.uk's “Linn Park, et al” site, http://www.linnpark.org.uk/ have requested to share pictures with my White Cart Walkway web page http://www.scotcities.com/cathcart/whitecartwalk.htm, to share any interesting finds in the park.

Hopefully we can now get back to the subject matter of the thread.

It is amazing that this mineral resource can still be found freely lying around 150 years after the peak production of shale derivatives. It is ridiculous to believe that it would not be exploited at the very time when scientific advancements were finding lots of new uses for the stuff!

Coal was easily worked in what is now the park The mills were mainly water powered but needed oil for lighting, lubrication and cleaning. Using this coal, the locally sourced shale and limestone could be processed for industrial uses, avoiding the heavy cost of transportation to this relative backwater.

The “Linn Park, et al” site, http://www.linnpark.org.uk/ site has an extensive section about the geology and minerals of Linn Park extracted from ‘Coal from Clarkston to Cathcart’ (1999) by Stuart Nisbet. This has much more detailed information than my amateur efforts.
“There are five main coal seams below the Index Limestone, their local names being the Sclutty, Smithy, Main, Jewel and Geordies coals: the ‘Cathcart Coals’. These local coals were exploited from an early date from outcrops in the river valley. Unlike areas of deep mining, Linn Park still has evidence of exposures and old workings. This is why the area remains so interesting today. The thickness of the Cathcart Coals varies considerably, but the variety of seams meant that there were usually several of workable thickness at any location.”

Coal was distilled in an industrial scale in Glasgow for gas making at very high temperatures to create permanent gas and as little liquid as possible.
Shale on the other hand was distilled at a low temperature to obtain liquid and solid products and a little quantity of gas. This could be achieved with small scale plant such as a Kirk's Vertical Retort.



The steam injection pipe at the base of the Vertical Retort (which would serve no purpose in a pipe bridge!) allowed for the diffusion of heat and the more efficient recovery of the vapours at a more even temperature.

The oil vapours were collected and cooled to condense in the vessel connected to the iron column and provide the raw material for fractional distillation of other products.

In the mid-1800's, aniline dyes were first created by destructive distillation and treatment of the residues with various chemicals.
At first they were very expensive but industrial processes soon made them economic to use.

[Lucky Poet]

Haud on, what confirmation? If you're going by the fact that there are similar structures around Broxburn, and the shale oil industry once existed there, therefore it's a retort, then you're on the wrong track. There may well be similar looking structures around Broxburn, particularly by the canal, but they definitely are not retorts. Here's what some retorts in the Broxburn area looked like:


At sixty foot tall and two hundred foot long, they'd be hard to miss if they were still there.

Also, something's been bugging me about the diagram vs the photograph: what may be an outlet pipe on the photo appears to point up rather than down as it should.

[BTJustice]

I still see no confirmation that this is a retort. I saw another opinion but as yet no proof. How do we know that what you have identified as a steam pipe was not a support rod?

I have no doubt shale exists in the linn. I have no doubt it was worked in the linn.

Proove that this is a retort and not a pipe bridge because at the moment there is more evidence to suggest it was a pipe bridge than there is to support the retort theory.

[banjo]

never mind aw that.the question is,can i heat ma hoose with that stuff?

[Anorak]

The industrial / archaeological history of Glasgow is so fascinating!
You couldn't see anything like the bits and pieces scattered around Linn Park in most UK cities.

Still find it weird that the civil engineer at docplus.co.uk, quoted by BTJustice about the alleged “pipe bridge” got back to me privately to tell me that he had changed his mind. Most unexpected but very welcome. After reading some of the posts on this thread I was beginning to have a few doubts myself!
Our engineer browsed my web page and this HG theme, thought I was “probably right” about the vertical retort, before he and his colleague went out to inspect it and gave me the final confirmation.


Was prompted by Lucky Poet's recent comments to have a look at the differences in extraction methods for the large scale processing of oil shale in the early twentieth century in West Lothian and the small scale operations in places such as Netherlee in the mid-nineteenth century.
Like chalk and cheese!

Here's what you would get in 1906 in West Lothian, with all those benches of retorts:


The large scale processing plant was situated in the middle of the shale field with the underground raw material extracted from numerous pits scattered all over the site.




Compare that to what you would find in c.1860 in Netherlee:


The raw shale could be found lying all over the place on the riverbank, so there was no need for extensive mine workings and complex machinery. All you needed was a Kirk's retort consisting of a single 10 foot long iron tube. It would make sense that the small retort would be situated beside the river, where there was an ample supply of water to produce the steam required to aid the distillation process, as well as the trough for the waste. The local shale, of which I have some samples, is very brittle and would have been easily broken down before being fed into the retort.

Various types of old style processing plant would probably have been used in West Lothian also, before the advances in technology. Hence the description given by my civil engineer contact of when he “was involved with what is now Scottish canals for a while and Broxburn and areas around are covered in these things. “
None of us were around in 1860 or 1906 to identify any of the plant associated with shale oil distillation. I reckon most of the stuff still surviving dates from the mid-twentieth century.