Fox, thanks for the info. With regard to the use of the word armoury, they had an armoury in the Territorial Drill Hall on Elder St. in Govan and they kept all kinds of personnel weapons and mortars, but not any light anti aircraft guns in it... unless the Bren gun was consodered a light anti aircraft weapon.

Amazing how much can spring from an innocent little thought

Artillery and gun batteries are fairly straightforward, their ammunition is stored in magazines, building (or isolated store in a ship) remote from the guns to minimise the chance of blowing up the whole place in the event of an incident involving the guns.

Amoury is an obvious choice in this case, since we appear to be referring to small arms, but in this particular case I'm reluctant to go down that particular route because of the isolation of the building. My concept and definition of an armoury is storage of weapons and ammunition, generally under secure conditions to avoid misappropriation. Some even add a requirement that the term be applied to places where training is carried out too, but I wouldn't go that far.

The isolated building, and relatively small, light doors (the frames suggest no heavy security) implies, to me, that the security aspect was not emphasised, relative to the safety aspect of the wall guarding the doors. The conditions would be less than ideal for weapons, and unless packed for storage rather than use, would soon have become rusty. A couple of small holes in the wall do not ventilation make, and there is no provision for heating. Even if there was not a guard posted, I'd like to think that an armoury would have been placed where it was actively seen, and could have been reached to get hold of the weapons quickly.

I also wonder about the rules that might have been applied with regard to storing arms and ammunition together at the time.

Even cars and bikes were supposed to be disabled if being left unattended, to deny the enemy their use.

I was just thinking that the building might have had some sort of name assigned to it, reflecting its purpose on the site.

Small Arms Store, or Small Arms Ammunition Store seems fine, but it just struck me that Small Arms and Ammunition Store seems a bit of a mouthfull, and having the two together might not have been likely, given the convenience of having both in the one place if the wrong people gained access.

I know... I'm wandering again

What we don't know, or rather I don't know is where the boundary fence of RNAS Abbotsinch was at that time.  Given it's proximity to the present boundary fence it could easily have been inside the secure area.

Guilty as charged - I do admit to assuming that this building was relatively isolated with respect to the rest of Abbotsinch.

My thoughts were that it would have been trashed with the rest of the station if it had been near any of the populated areas, and that it had been located remotely because of tis function and the protective wall.

On that thought, I wonder how many, or if there are any, buildings remain from Abbotsinch, scattered about the area? There are bound to be plans of the airfield knocking around.

I've used one or two business (ie. not farms, although there's no reason why they wouldn't have claimed buildings too) located along the tracks there, and it occurs to me that they may be in ex-Abbotsinch buildings, and that some 'little old houses' planted there might actually be ex-Abbotsinch too.

I can't prove it, and it's been so long is I've been there, but they may, and I emphasize the may me some that are built of the red, smooth-faced brick that sometimes features, but I'm not saying this for sure, just as a hazy memory from long ago. It would need a look to confirm one way or another.

It would have been at the NW corner of the airfield at that time.  The road went straight across the present runway to Paisley.  A runway extension scheme when it became Glasgow Airport meant diverting the road up to the motorway.

I can't say that any other brick buildings ring any bells.  I think there are remains of a couple of the pillboxes with one of them being used as the foundations of the flying club.

The phrase Small arms and ammuniton store came from a couple of apparently knowlegable guys on 28DL.

I was unaware that we were still speaking about the mysterious Abbotsinch "storage building". Anyway, Ive changed my mind about my definition of an armoury :

"An armoury is a place where Small arms & Ammuniton are stored."

I believe now, in view of Apollo's, "generally under secure conditions",  that the use of "armoury"  would imply the building was in a "built-up" area, not in an isolated location.

I should add that the definition is very much what I have come to understand an armoury to be over the years - I didn't want to start quoting dictionaries since they are based on etymological definitions, rather than practical application (should be the same, but words change over time - think of an armoury a few hundred years ago to see what I mean).

From visiting stately homes, an armoury means something different there, compared with say the armoury on an aircraft carrier today. Consider an armoury today, which would probably be a nice warm place, with armoured doors and controlled access, an armourer in attendance to control weapons issue, and room with rifles, hand-guns, automatic weapons and similar small arms, plus ammunition, all neatly racked out.

I still think that building, even in wartime, would not have been considered environmentally suitable for weapons storage. It would have been cold and damp (there's no chimney or proper ventilation), so anything made of steel would soon have started to rust of not constantly maintained.

Some sort of constant use would almost have been essential, to keep the contents 'fresh'.

There seems to be a recent new development in relation to this building.

Google does this area in an extended zoom mode, so you can get right down to the detail of the W-shaped blast wall, however...

The current aerial image was taken in sunshine, with shadows being clearly cast, and from this it seems clear that the building now has no roof.

Clearly a significant change since the building was photographed/recorded back in April of this years, only three months ago.

Aerial view from Google

You can now explore the building using the Bird's Eye view, but bear in mind the copyright date places the images used as being from 2007.

Definitely a roof there in April... Photo gallery

Aerial pics at the time of the photographs seemed to show that the roof was below the level of the building's walls and therefore probably thinner than it looked as if it should be.  This would be in accord with the storage of explosive devices as the blast would take the roof off and save the main structural walls.

Older pics show a different roof than Google's, with different markings.

The length of the shadows in the new Google images as cast by the east wall inside the structure appears to be the same as the length of shadow cast by the building on the ground outside, so the roof would have to be really low if that was the case. There's also some sort of splat on the 'floor', not apparent on the earlier pics. Guess it's another spot that would need a wander to verify.

I'm on the scrounge for some more info...

The visit notes refer to side, central and end walls, which don't mean a lot to the reader, and only make sense to the visitor - can you identify which walls these correspond to in terms the compas, viz north, east or whatever.

(Don't alter the page itslef - it's offline at the moment, so any changes there will be lost just now).

Side walls are the long walls  i.e. the north and south end walls shorter east and west.  The central wall is the central partition wall.  The thickness of the latter can be estimated from the distance the wall vents are appart externally and their distance from the partition wall internally.  

Ok, that should help.

It won't be visible for a while, but I noticed this building was near some of the old airfield's pillboxes, a matter of yards, so I've added these as well.

Should've twigged to this before.

It's one of the downsides of the way that all the plotted points only exist on the page they belong to, rather than in one BIG list where they can all be seen together. Fine if you happen to know that there will or might be something interesting nearby, you can just go and copy the point from one page to another so it can be seen, but you could have two or three interesting points near each other, and maybe even be related, but if you didn't actually know or recognise them, you'd never you they were next to one another.

If the info was in a normal database, I'd be able to program something to deal with it, unfortunately, even though I know the data about the points is accessible inside the wiki structure, I don't know how to pool it. Frustrating, and becoming more so as the number of points grows.

Now that there is a reasonable number of points to see, it would be really nice to have a big map that showed where they all were. I resisted the urge to do this manually from the start, which was probably a good idea, but doesn't make not having the option any less unforgivable.

Yes somekind of composite map would be nice.  Maybe it could be done on Local Government area basis.

Yoy have lost me on the shadow from the east interior wall.  There is no internal wall on the east - it is the end with the big room in it.  I am also not sure what splat you refer to.  Any chance of more details?

Ah... you're reading more than I wrote, or I wrote badly.

I said "The length of the shadows in the new Google images as cast by the east wall inside the structure", in other words I'm referring to the shadow cast by the sun shining from the east, and casting a shadow of the eastern wall of the building into what now appears to be the open interior of the building. The lower left line of the shadow  that runs southeast to northwest looks as long as the same shadow cast outside the building.

There also appears to be a puddle (the splat) on the floor, which would make reasonable sense if it rained recently as the floor would be sheltered from the wind, and, as it appears, the doors have been blocked.

You simply wouldn't get a "roof" shadow that looks anything like the length of the ground shadow to the northwest unless there was no roof.

Did you follow the link? Just change the view on the current SeSco page to satellite. You can't miss the dark area in the middle of the Google view, which doesn't appear in any of the alternate images, so is not an old existing feature, hence my suggestion that it is water/rain based. All te other have pics: Multimap, VE, and People's Map, plus the Bird's Eye view of course, for comparison.

Actually, if you look at the Bird's Eye view, you can see that the recessed roof is so shallow it cast virtually no perceptible shadow at all, so the Google view is really confirmed by it, and shows the roof must have been swiped

Aerial view from Google

Here's an enhanced clip, showing the internal shadow now being cast, and the puddle:



Unfortunately, no composite map is possible at the moment thanks to the wiki structure and my lack of knowledge.

I have thought of a way it might be done, but don't have the knowledge even to turn it into a test

Maybe one day.

It could be that the roof has fallen in or it could just be a large puddle at that end!  It occurred to me that the hollow roof may have been designed to hold water ( there does not appear to be any drainage ) so that in the event of an explosion it had some fire damping properties.  Otherwise it seems a convoluted method of roof building.