Summerlee

I’ve been off work this week. With it being the first week of the school holidays we had considered going away. Originally, we had discussed going to the West Country but gradually put this off in favour of going away later in the year. As it was, the torrential rain and flooding in Devon makes that look like a lucky escape but we have hardly had the driest week ourselves. There are only so many times that the children can be kept amused by the latest Eastern European animated feature on LoveFilm Instant so it is fortunate that we actually live somewhere that is a major tourist destination itself.

 One of the things I’ve discovered over the years is that many of the best tourist attractions in Scotland are often free. Places like the Kelvingrove and Riverside Museum in Glasgow are great entertainment for the boys but this time we decided to go to Summerlee, the “Museum of Scottish Industrial Life”, which is in Coatbridge. I used to pass by this when I worked in Bellshill but I didn’t really know much about it. I set the Sat Nav, just in case I got lost, although it was the Sat Nav that had the problems as we had the wrong postcode. Anyway, my memory of Lanarkshire isn’t too bad and we found our way there. The museum is on the site of the Summerlee ironworks which closed during the great depression. Part of the ironworks has been excavated – it seems odd that archaeologists are now turning the attention from ancient ruins to sites that would be within the memory of the town’s oldest residents but these things are as much a part of our history as the castles and battle sites and are worth preserving in their own right.

The museum is split into two sections. The main hall is a more traditional museum with restored items of machinery along with artefact’s from those who lived and worked around the ironworks. The rest of the site is more of a living museum with a working tramway (seemingly imported from the Ruhr) going a short distance to miner’s cottages which have been decorated to demonstrate how home life for the workers would have been in periods from the 1840’s through to the 1960’s (sadly, I recognised quite a few items from the later homes). Next to the cottages is a preserved mine-head which Raymond and I went down with a tour guide. Fortunately, this was dark enough to prevent me from becoming entirely claustrophobic but it is narrow, damp and rather unpleasant. It does give a very good idea of what the working conditions were like for the miners but it isn’t somewhere I would want to be on a regular basis.

Aside from the museum there is also a café and decent sides playground so the kids were kept amused and the rain, thankfully, did ease off. Overall it was another decent day out and quite a cheap one at that. We did venture into Edinburgh later in the week but the traffic system is now so messed up there that even the Sat Nav gave up!