I found this building yesterday in a field just over the Northern boundary of Glasgow Airport.  It is not recorded by RCAHMS as far as I can see and I have no idea what it was for so have not started a page. The field has bases in it and a bridge over a burn. The surrounding fields have banks of demolition debris bulldozed along their edges.

The building has 2 rooms to the west and one larger room to the east.  Whatever it was used for it required heavyduty earthwiring right round it and over the roof. Opinions are sought.

Good pics.

Unqualified thoughts are the obvious - this is an ex-RNAS area, RNAS Abbotsinch, so could be a leftover.

There's also the Postwar option as the civil airfield developed, and the mention of what would appear to be more earthing than normal could suggest buildings used for early radio installations for the site, or even early Radar installations, test, or development.

RNAS Abbotsinch is probably a good starting point though. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but not yet attempted to track any details down.

Geez Fox, I'm really disappointed in myself at not recognizing this building at all. I used this side road (is it the one that goes down to the Rid Smiddy?) a great deal, yet don't recall ever seeing the building. It has a buffer wall so it likely had some wartime function, and as Apollo suggests, probably associated with the Abbotsinch Fleet Air Arm base.

I posted a link to this on the WW2 forums, there are a couple of members of the Airfield Research Group on there. Hopefully they'll be able to give you an answer .

Right road Dugald but at most times of the year it is hidden from the road by a large Hawthorn hedge so would not be that obvious.  Mind you I have been down the same road thousands of times and never saw it but then I wasn't looking for anything.

Thanks Historian the more brains the better.  It seems to me that it must have been built for something specific, probably as Apollo says connected with RNAS Abbotsinch but until we have an idea of what it is it would be difficult to give it a page.  I certainly cannot recall anything else with the heavy earthing cables or with similar baffle walling.

First opinions are that it might be an ammo/pyrotechnics store, as much due to the blast wall & ventilation as the amount of earthing.
Not cast in tablets of stone, though.

could it been some sort off out post for the old renfrew airtport at arklestone

I think it is too far away from the old Renfrew Airport and more likely to be associated with Abbotsinch or some other wartime base in the area.

Something I hadn't thought of which someone in another forum suggested was that the heavy wiring was in case of a lightning strike.  Possibly it was an ammunition store.

I don't think I'd go along with the ammunition-building suggestion. just guessing, but the building has the appearance more of an air-raid shelter. The baffle wall at the entrance is consistent with the air-raid shelter guess. I'm not sure either that heavy wiring was a part of an ammunition building... and weren't they usually pertially underground?

It's not an air raid shelter, since they were generally single room constructions if built from bricks, and the pre-cast concrete Stanton shelters were usually covered with earth for extra protection. I would tend to agree with the ammo/pyrotechnics explanation for now, since the magazines at HAA batteries were internally divided into five compartments in order to separate the charges from the warheads.
Still never seen such an unusually-shaped blast wall though.

I wondered of anyone was going to pick up on the blast wall shape.

Not only is the shape interesting, which must be a clue, as the effort of building that as opposed to a rectangular lump must indicates some purpose, but there is also the aspect of the single door at the opposite end of the building, which has no similar protection.

Perhaps the structure is not a blast wall, since it's unlikely an attacker would play 'nice' and not launch an assault against the undefended access to the opposite end of building, and you can hardly assume bombs will fall at one end of a building, and not another.

Such blast walls would be defensive, and play no part in protecting personnel in the event the building was some sort of explosives store. This would require surrounding earth banks on all sides, intended to deflect and dissipate the initial force upwards rather then outwards. Falling debris may be hazard, but less so so than a direct, adjacent explosive blast.

We may be looking at an incomplete picture, with only this single building and the shaped wall at one end.

For example, the wall shape would afford defenders cover to shoot from, unlike the more usual flat blast wall, and allow them to defend to their sides. This would be impossible with a flat wall, which would merely provide a 'killing corridor' for the attacker to clear. And a determined attacker could make a run for the protective middle of the W formed by the walls, and lob a grenade or two over the top to despatch the defenders fairly quickly.

Then again, the three area formed by the walls could just be for the Maintenance Group, forming sand, cement and gravel pits, with the tools stored in the building!

Lots of other possibilities, it would be nice to think a definitive answer will appear.

Yes the baffle wall are yet another mystery.  One thought that occurred to me was the possibilty that they were designed to trap any light spilled from the 2 doors.  Mind you it seems a lot of bother to go to.  There could have been a similar wall at the other end which the farmer could have taken down to make entry/exit easier for animals as it has been used as an animal shelter.

Interesting point, Fox. If you've ever seen the dispersal area from Macmerry airfield at Gladsmuir Junction, at the end of the two 'E-pens' is a crew standby building. Difference is that it's raised off the ground and reached by steps at both ends. It also has ventilation slots and no windows, but is one big room. It's also like the Black Hole of Calcutta inside. There are no blast walls apparent though.
This building doesn't appear to be anything like the same idea, since painting the interior walls white would defeat the purpose of letting the aircrew acquire night vision naturally by sitting in a room lit by red light bulbs. Just a thought though.

I showed pictures of the building to an ex army chap tonight and his immediate reaction was that it was an explosives  store and that the wiring was anti lightning.  The baffle wall is designed so that if something blows in one store room it will blow out the door (weakest point) but the blast will be directed across the angles and back into the room and consequently not affect the store room next door.

Can I dispel the lighting theories? I didn't want to jump on the suggestion earlier, but it's moving into the "Credibility By Repetition" zone.

Lighting conductors are placed on tall structures in the hope of diverting lighting strikes attracted to the structures as a result of the high electrical field they (the structures, not the conductors) cause in the surrounding air. Contrary to popular belief, the conductor doesn't attract the strike, the structure does. When the field becomes strong enough, the air breaks down and the lighting heads for the nearest attractive path to ground - this is initially the structure, not the conductor, which only come into play when the strike nears it. The plan being that as the strike nears the structure, the points on the conductor will cause increased air breakdown and ionisation, resulting in the strike going for the conductor rather than the structure  - it doesn't always!

The conductor's job is to sacrifice itself, in the hope that the strike will pass preferentially down the metal strap of the conductor and to earth, where the charge is dissipated. In the course of conducting thousands of amperes to ground, the conductor will most likely be vaporised, so is very much a one-time defence, lighting can, and does, often strike twice or more in the same place, since it has a ready made ionisation path through the air after the first strike, and the vaporised conductor has coated a handy path to earth on the once protected structure. With luck though, the source will have moved on, so the second strike chance falls somewhat.

The last thing you would do with an explosive store is put a lighting conductor ON it. You might want to put one one tall structures nearby, but you certainly wouldn't want to be deliberately causing thousand of amperes to be flashing over the outside of a building with explosives, and worse still, detonators inside it.

A brick building is not a Faraday Cage, which would actually be perfectly safe with megavolts dancing and arcing away on the outside.

I think someone was looking for a bell-pull attached to a leg tonight

That building would fall apart if a single box of hand grenades went off inside it, and the idea that an adjoining room in the same building could be unaffected by an explosion through the wall?

If the initial bang didn't do the job, then there is indeed a fair bet that the reinforcing/amplifying effect of the secondary blast reflected back into the confined room space from the angles walls would finish the job. The idea of reflecting blast back into the enclosed space it just came from just beggars belief. Explosive handling/safety looks for ways to dissipate any blast, preferably upwards, as any sideways component has the capacity to take out personnel and equipment. Even falling debris is (relatively) safer.

(You can tell I'm the one invited to leave the room at Brainstorming Sessions, can't you? )

I've actually got some pics of a structure with earth straps bolted around the outside for radio use, but I can't get hands on them as they PC they're is playing up and the drive's not accessible unless I dismantle it and slap it in another one. There was definitely VHF kit in use (100-150 Mhz), for  distance of 30 miles or so, and there might have HF too, around 30 MHz,to get further, but I'd have to dig up the history to confirm that.

My we are a tad vitriolic today!.. There is no chance the chap was pulling my leg.  He was involved in setting up a military museum in Ireland a few years ago and spent his life in the Irish military.  He went on to say that during the troubles explosives had to be accounted for and guarded at all times and the he had been involved in building an explosive store which had a somewhat similar layout including the earth wires.  He said they had a great deal of trouble driving the earthing spikes into the specified depth.  The main room would have been for the gelignite etc. which required ventilation to prevent it sweating and the smaller rooms for fuses so we would not be talking about a building stacked from floor to ceiling necessarily.

It could have housed demolition charges to render the airfield useless in the case of invasion.

Today I showed the pics to a retired British army officer who had not seen such a building but thought it was probably a weapons or ammunition store.  He thought the baffle walls might have beeen stacked with sandbags and have been the place where you pointed your weapon at the bags and proved it was clear of ammo before handing it in.

So as usual you pays your money....................

The walls, including the inner ones are quite thick.  Check the position of the vents externelly and then internally. Aerial pics give the impression that the roof is inset, i.e. it has a parapet round it.  Given there is a line of bricks offset near the top of the walls this is probably related to the height of the roof.  In which case it is quite thin.

Concencus on 28DL is that it is a Small Arms Armoury used for storing machine gun and light anti aircraft ammunition.  Apparently they are usually much bigger than this one.  Heavy wire is there to discharge an electrostatic discharge from any source. ( Knowledge of electrostatics would have been much more limited in those days.

The baffle wall is designed to protect from blasts in both directions and more modern versions exist at Greenham Common.

Fox, I've had another good look at the pictures and I hang my hat on it having been an air-raid shelter, with perhaps some modifications carried out later... such as the wiring and rear door. Could it have been used as an armoury? Yes, i suppose it could have at some time been used as an armoury, but than so could virtually any building have been used as an armoury... the main thing is for the building to be dry. I doubt that it was ever built as an armoury, nor as a munitions dump.

An ordnance/bomb disposal building?  If it had been used for storage of ordnance, surely there would be other, similar buildings in the vicinity, if not, for good reason, immediately adjacent. Such a building at RNAS Machrihanish, HMS Landrail, was located on the fringe of the airfield. According to local report, a fatal accident took place within the building suringf a disposal operation, resulting in the flat roof being blown off and deposited at a short distance from the remains of the walls of the building.

This would account both for the isolated location of the building, and the peculiarities noted in its structure. An air raid shelter, to have any real purpose, would have to be located in the vicinity of personnel engaged in some task, while an armoury would not be located in an isolated position, such that it would require special security measures.

I also disagree with the air raid shelter scenario. It's too big, and even civilian shelters had a four inch thick reinforced concrete roof. What kind of 'postwar modifications' would have justified the expense of altering it?

The air raid shelter is a non-runner, simply because the building is neither underground, nor does it have any practical protection from blast, so offers little protection and is actually more dangerous than just standing outside - if the walls blew in, you're gone.

The pic below is one version of the standard airfield shelter that was used. This offered protection by earth banking against the walls to deflect blast upwards, and sometimes had a building at its centre. The arrangement of walls and warren ensured there was no direct path to the occupants, for blast (or, I suspect, fire from an attacker).



The small armoury seems a distinct possibility, but having looked at the pics again, looking at the door frames, these are not designed to be particularly robust in terms of security, or to allow the passage of anything other than hand-held items (ok, small-arms), I'm thinking in terms of moving ordnance. It just wouldn't be effective or efficient.

There may also be something in Fox and Passerby's observations (thanks for posting btw - we've been on tenterhooks waiting for you after the gems dropped into the Main Site pages ), thinking back to the suggestion that the roof appears to be of lighter construction than the wall (I'm inferring that difference from what I can see in the pics) as this would mean it would 'pop' before the walls, blowing and sending blast upwards rather than sideways, with the external V wall doing its bit for anything that was blown out of the doors.

Incidentally, trying to be tactful the doors are not in centre of the V of the external walls, therefore blast or debris exiting the door would not be 'reflected' back into the room as suggested above, but would return and strike the wall to the side of the door.

Meant to ask earlier, but keep forgetting

Is the arrangement of the interior as per the blindingly obvious, with half the building dedicated to a single large room to the east with a single, unbaffled door , and the west part divided equally between the two rooms with the baffled doorways?

The real question concerns the walls. From the pic of the two adjacent doors, this dividing wall is only a single course of bricks, as would the wall containing the doorways appear to be. Are the remaining walls similar? If so, the whole building is not as strong as that curious wall, which may also be significant.

Are there any internal apertures or similar between any of the internal spaces, or are the walls complete and uninterrupted? This would mean no communication or internal transfer of any contents between the rooms, other than by walking around outside the building.

Considering the robustness of the baffle to the west, I think it may (ok, I'm setting myself up far a fall) be safe to assume the door to the east never had a baffle, the reason for this being the lack of any foundation being visible. They might knock it down if it was in their/animal's way, but they'd be unlikely to remove the foundation and make good the ground with soil to a proper depth. Animal feet and rain would soon erode a thin layer of soil over concrete/brick, revealing anything solid just under the surface.

Just some more rambling thoughts.

Yes one big room to the east and two apparently identical ones to the west.

Well spotted. Yes it does appear that the western wall is single brick but all the partition walls seem to be 4 bricks thick.  If the pic of the 2 doors had been taken from the south it would look identical.  If you look at the internal shot and compare it with the spacing of the vents from outside the internal walls must be 4 bricks thick too.  The rooms internally had no features apart from the vents.  No communication between them or up to the roof that I could see hence only 1 pic.

As to the eastern door I didn't see any evidence of a baffle wall or fell any walking about.

Ok, try this...

Small arms armoury and weapons store. The east room reserved for 'safe' weapons only, those with no ammunition, and no live ammunition stored with them. This makes the dividing wall the protection, hence no wall at the door.

The west room reserved for ammunition and issue and return of 'live' weapons. As noted above. weapons could be proven to be 'clear', and any accidental discharges that escaped the room would be retained by the double bounce around the V, and not be returned to the room if they happened to rebound from the wall, as might happen with plain, flat wall.

If they stored items such as grenades, or mortars for defence, these may have been stored on the west, with fuzes, detonators, primers etc to the west.

I'm not 100% sold on the static/earthing side of things (and why run it on the outside, it should be on the inside, and could have exited at the floor vent), although procedure could require it. Detonation by such things as sparks is a movie myth (for common materials at least) as the activation potential is way above the energy such sparks can deliver. Think of the life for the average soldier if there was even a remotely realistic chance of his ammunition or ordnance going off as he moved around normally, let alone while in action. The enemy would just have to keep him moving... and wait.

That seems a reasonable assessment of the available evidence

Sorry , the title will need to be fettled!  

It would anyway

It seems to be an awful mouthful - there must be a technical term buried somewhere.

Quoted from The Fox

Sorry , the title will need to be fettled!  

An armoury is a place where Small arms & Ammuniton are stored. Now this piece of knowledge is really something very elementary (especially on this forum!) and this, together with the fact that I don't know what fettled means, and Apollo saying, "...there must be a technical term buried somewhere." leads me to wonder if i am missing something or if I'm being led up that proverbial path...  which is it Fox?

Fettled means fiddled about with a bit!  I hadn't noticed that I had put 3 ls in small.  

I think the name might come from it being a store for ammo not only for hand rifles and machine guns but also light anti aircraft guns.  You may be right that it is still an armoury.  If I am leading you up a garden path then this is unintentional and fortunately virtual.

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.