On Friday last week I travelled down to Stevenston, Ayrshire with a like-minded social history friend to introduce him to the Ardeer Peninsula. It is a spit of land about one and half miles long and a mile wide in its widest part. It is bordered by the sea on one side, the Irvine Bay, and by the Rivers Irvine and then Garnock on the other side and end. Think of it as a V shape spit. Early Ordnance Survey maps from the late 19th Century to the early years of the 20th Century show some factory buildings at the top of the V shape spit. You will not fine much else marked on the map. Later editions of OS maps covering the First and Second World Wars will not show any markings because it was protected against attack from our wartime enemies. The extraordinary thing is that at the middle of the 20th Century, this land supported the work and jobs of a major industry employing 13,000 men and women. Including three generations of my Wife’s family.
This peninsula is the site of the Nobel Dynamite Factory. Everything you know about Alfred Nobel and the annual prizes for Peace and Literature etc came from his explosive invention and the major industry he created on this isolated part of the Ayrshire coast. He died in 1896 but by this time he had invented a successful way of manufacturing dynamite that could be transported across the world. There is a very helpful website called threetowners.com which has archived helpful articles and histories relating to the Ardeer Factory. This article on their site tells you about Alfred Nobel and how he arrived at this location.
Eventually the Dynamite Factory was bought and run by ICI after the First World War.
The purpose of our visit on this occasion was to introduce my companion to the Site and to take some fresh photographs for this post.
I had previously visited the Site on four occasions over the past five years. I was introduced to it by a fellow family history researcher who I had met at Strathclyde University. He took me there on two occasions, the first to show me Africa House, a Dutch style building that had been built for the 1938 Commonwealth Exhibition in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow. It was taken down and completely rebuilt on the site of the Dynamite Factory and used as a staff canteen. Two years ago, the new owners of the Site sought planning permission to demolish the building. This was denied after a popular protest and the Irvine town councillors prevented it from happening. The following photos that I took in 2018 show the derelict building in a wooded area of the old factory site.
My guide then took me to the Site proper. To access it we had to walk along the beach to the end of the peninsula and climb up onto the site. We had to navigate fences that had been torn open by other ‘intruders’ and then when we had explored what we were looking for, exited through another hole in the fence further up, onto the beach and back to our car.
I have to explain the term ‘intruder’. The Site in 2018 was still completely deserted and hardly any buildings left to see. We were not breaking in, just using existing fence holes and gaps. In some ways we were exercising our Scottish ‘Right to Roam’ laws, even though the land is private property and subject to all sorts of consultations for future use. Such as housing development (which I cannot foresee happening due to decades of potential land contamination). Or more recently for nuclear waste disposal (which I suspect will cause as much uproar as when Alfred Nobel proposed making dynamite there). The Site was easily accessible.
Last week, with my eager companion wanting to experience this historical landscape for the first time, we had a different experience.
We arrived in Stevenston shortly after low tide which meant we had plenty of time to walk the beach to the end of the Peninsula.
Along the way there are many examples of the old pier workings from where the dynamite was taken out to ships waiting in the Irvine Bay. This was also the means by which any accidents were limited by being away from the local Irvine Harbour.
Reaching the estuary entrance to the River Irvine, we looked up to the old Harbour with the broken Big Idea access bridge crossing the river.
The Big Idea was a visitor attraction that was funded and planned by the Millennium Commission in 2000. It closed in 2003 due to dwindling visitor numbers. It also had a better rival in Glasgow when the Science Centre was built on the site of the old Glasgow Garden Festival, in 2001.
The Big Idea was a celebration of science and engineering that was housed in an innovative shaped building with a grass roof. It was accessed from Irvine Harbour by a bridge. When the Big Idea closed to the public, and without any other ideas for its future use, the building remained closed and the middle part of the bridge was removed to prevent any further access.
The following photos that I took in 2018 show the old building as it was from the approach of the bridge.
What has happened since then is that the owners of the Peninsula have reinforced all the wire fencing around the site. We were going to abandon this visit unless we could gain access. We did, eventually find a gap at the bottom of the fence through which we were able to squeeze through. We were now on the site.
What we were able to see were the landscaped areas that Nobel had originally created.
The process of making and manufacturing the nitro – glycerine, that is the chief component of dynamite, is described in this interesting article on the Three Towners website. The chemical has to be mixed in large vats in huts located on hills so that it flowed down into containers and could be transported to other locations on site where it was packed into tubes and boxed up. Nobel had to protect the workers, and the whole site from mass explosions. Therefore, the Peninsula is landscaped so that incidental explosions are contained within built up earthworks.
The following two photos that were taken in 2018 show how these earthworks were created.
The Site had its own railway system on a very small scale. It ran for several kilometres around to all the manufacturing and storage places. It transported the nitro-glycerine to the huts for making into tubes of dynamite. We followed the tracks for a short distance. The sleepers are still to be seen.
What I had failed to notice was that the current owners of the site were doing a lot of excavating and quarrying, mainly of sand, and had reinforced the boundary fencing as well as blocking our path out to a known gap in the fence. Again we had to contemplate retracing our steps and a longer walk back to our car and hoped for pot of tea with cake at Irvine Harbour. As we pondered this, a very large landrover type vehicle arrived with a security officer and a dog. This turned into a less frightening experience than we imagined. Not only was the dog very friendly but his owner was also. He advised us that we had two choices, the first being a long trek after being transported to the other side of the site where he would unlock a gate for us. The other was to trace our steps along the fence where there was a gap beneath through which we could scramble back down to the beach. We chose that. We also got a lift to the gap plus a helping hand. Along the way, the security guard, when told by us that we were exploring the history of Ardeer, said that all the legal documents and other plans relating to Nobel’s Dynamite Factory, were now in the hands of an Australian University. It was a longer walk back along the beach than we expected, but we were safe and sound and heading for a much needed cup of tea.
I cannot see a return to the Peninsula for me unless public access is given as part of any future development. My assumption is that in a fairly short period of time all of Nobel’s original landscaped earthworks will have been removed or redeveloped into something else.
I’m delighted that I have at least had the opportunity to see this interesting place and recorded it for the benefit of my wife’s family history before it is all redeveloped. It also inspired a watercolour painting that I made shortly after my 2018 visit.
