Barony Colliery, to the west of Auchinleck in Ayrshire was the last of the pits in the west of Scotland to close. It consisted of a number of shafts, although 1 and 2 were closed in the 1960’s, but all that survives is the headgear of No.3 shaft, more commonly known as the Barony A-Frame….
Category: Industrial Photography
#662 – Taylor’s Bell Foundry 2
The initial job for the foundry men was removing the slag from the furnace before they turned up the heat again and returned to their chairs in front of the heater at the other end. Not long after, they returned to the furnace, tuned off the heat and began to pour the molten iron into…
#661 – Taylor’s Bell Foundry 1
John Taylor’s bell foundry is somewhere I’d been aware of for some time, and when I found out that they did tours and allowed visitors to watch the casting, I started to keep an eye out for when I could go along for a look. Two years passed, before I actually booked on as 2024…
#660 – Middleport Flour Mill, Stoke
I took a wander round the Middleport area as I wanted to photograph the bottle kilns at Furlong Mills (not the easiest things to photograph and they’re not very interesting photos), but a tall brick chimney nearby piqued my interest. Turns out it was the Middleport pottery, which I didn’t have the time to go…
#659 – Price and Kensington Bottle kiln
Stoke is somewhere I only ever drive through on the A50 while trying to get somewhere else. Other than a couple of visits to Chatterley Whitfield Colliery on the outskirts, I’ve never had cause to stop and explore. But as I was heading down to the East Midlands and had some time to spare, I…
#658 – Ratcliffe Power Station 2
It’s possible to see the cooling towers from the south and the west, so I had a quick look round to get a few different perspectives. There are eight in total, neatly arranged in two rows of four. I found that the most interesting composition was the one above, with the sun over my shoulder…
#657 – Ratcliffe Power Station 1
Ratcliffe Power Station was one of many built in Britain in the 1960s and 1970’s but it’s claim to fame was that when it closed at the end of September 2024 it was the last coal burning station in the country. Positioned to take advantage of the abundance of coal that was mined by the…
#656 – Brierfield Gas Holder 2
I’ve not got much by way of history, but there again it’s a gasholder – they aren’t the most storied of things. What I’ve found online is that it was built by the Tunstill’s (owners of Brierfield Mills which is just a stone’s throw away) and taken over by the Nelson Local Board in 1888…
#655 – Brierfield Gas Holder 1
I last went here in 2015 when I was accompanying my friend Katriina around a few places in Lancashire and we had a quick look here. It was around this time that the National Grid were accelerating their removal of gas holders and I regret not photographing more. I had it in my head that…
#654 – Clipstone Colliery Revisit Part 2
There were three main areas visited – the winding engine hall, the adjacent power house and the heapstead under the upcast. The winding engine hall is now used as an events venue and has a large collection of mining memorabilia which was interesting but not what I wanted to photograph. The power house was more…
Mechanical Landscapes 