Infrastructure for Mills on the

River Calder

The river Calder and its tributaries had many structures incorporated into these water systems during the industrial revolution to provide motive power for the new textile factories that were built in and around Lochwinnoch. Prior to this mills utilised the water of the Calder to grind corn. In total there were 12 infrastructure projects with the majority on the Calder itself. The map below shows the majority of these. The Kaim dam is missing because it would have made the map unwieldy.

The water rights on the Calder were very extensive and valuable. The area of ground naturally draining into the Calder is about 8150 acres or nearly 13 square miles. The natural flow from which could yield 300 cubic feet per minute over the whole day (excluding severe drought). The dams constructed on it enabled a good part of the river flow to be stored during the night and meal hours raising the available flow to about 500 cubic feet per minute during ordinary summer weather.

Probably the first artificial structure built on the Calder was the lade that ran along the side of the Laigh Road that follows the Calder as it weaves its way through the Glen and the associated weir to divert the water into the lade. Its purpose was to supply water to drive a mill for grinding corn. Each estate had mills that serviced the farms under their ownership. In the feudal system that operated in Scotland at this time this was known as thirlage. This law ensured that all the grain the vassals produced could be measured and thus taxed. These mills and their infrastructure would pre-date any infrastructure built to service textile mills on the Calder.

McDowall and his partners George Houston and Robert Burns setup the Copartnery of Houston Burns & Co on 29th Feb 1788 for the manufacture of cotton into yarn on the water of Calder and the water of Cart. McDowall put the Calderpark Mill which he had just built into this arrangement but he also contributed:-

“All and whole the lint and corn mills of Calder and Caldermill upon the Calder and Cloakburn with the whole Aquaducts and privileges and pertinents belonging thereto and the full and complete right to and use and privilege of the water……”

Clearly these mills and their supporting infrastructure were in place prior to 1788 making this infrastructure the earliest to be built on the Calder. (The article about the Calder Glen Mill raises the possibility that there was a meal mill located at the Millar’s pool prior to the mill that became known as “Whitton’s” on the Cloak burn.) The photograph below was taken either late 1800’s or early 1900’s and shows the lade with water in it. Growing up in the village I never saw water in it even after heavy rainfall. The photograph was taken at the end of the lade at the start of the low road where the public road rises steeply just after Whitton’s mill.

Today the lade is little more than a dried-up hollow that runs along the side of the low road which follows the banks of the Calder.

The map from 1856 below shows the weir and start of the lade.

Today the weir is completely gone and little remains of the entrance of the lade. The photograph below is where the lade started. The actual entrance was to the right of the two large stone blocks tied together with metal straps.

This next photograph is a view from the opposite bank looking more or less along the line of the weir towards the lade entrance in the centre of the image.

A number of infrastructure projects were undertaken from 1780 till 1830. The most visible one today is The Falls at the start of the Glen. When built it was 19ft 8ins tall and 85ft circumference. In places it is now slightly lower due to some of the top courses being swept away. In the Mills Infrastructure gallery there is a gallery of photographs of The Falls displaying its many faces. I have selected one, displayed below, which shows the substantial stone wall that constitutes The Falls.

A survey carried out in 1899 referred to this structure as the Horse Shoe Dam and concluded if the gravel that had accumulated was cleared out to a depth of two feet the volume of water impounded by the dam would be 408,000 gallons. In the image below I have superimposed the current Ordinance Survey (OS) map with the 1856 map. The light blue is the OS map outline of the river above the falls. The surface area of water today is much less than in 1899 which was measured as 0.75 acres. Back then the water was the full width of dam. It had to be because the sluice controlling the flow into the Calderpark Mill lade was in the section of the dam wall nearest the road.

The following sequence of photographs show the arch in the dam wall through which the water entered the lade when the sluice was opened. The second (top right) is an image of the lade looking towards the Bridgend bridge and the third (bottom) is the far end of this section of the lade before it went under the small arch in the Bridgend bridge.

On 21st September 1921 a report was prepared for Hugh Crawford’s Trust who were custodians of the textile mill water rights. Specifically it ascertained the condition of various parts of the water infrastructure. The Calderpark lade by this time was disused however water still freely entered it from the dam sluice and flowed the 45 yards to the Bridgend Bridge where the embankment was cut allowing the water to return to the Calder. Scouring was evident on the bridge masonry and to prevent further damage it was recommended that the intake was completely sealed. The cost of this work was estimated at £22.

The lade feeding the Calderhaugh mill was also the subject of this report. In fact it may have been the issue with this part of the infrastructure that prompted the report. Specifically, when the river is in flood an uncontrolled amount of water enters the lade and floods a field which is rented out resulting in numerous complaints.

The report notes the intake is “in a most suitable position for drawing water from the river. This, however, is a disadvantage when the Intake is out of order.” The weir that impounded water for the sluice is shown in the map above. A photograph of it is shown below. It is located just after a swimming hole known as the Plumb just in front of the Big School which can be seen through the trees on the left of the photograph.

The relief dam is 16ft wide and also required repairs. In total the remedial works were estimated to amount to £67. The following two photographs show the weir as of 2024, completely washed away and three ladies standing at the relief dam sometime in the mid 1930’s.

A survey in 1899 reported the surface area of water impounded by the weir to be 0.25 acre and if silt was removed to a depth of 18 inches the volume of water stored would be 116,000 gallons.

When McDowall built The Falls and the associated lades for the Calderpark Mill he also impounded the Queenside Loch. This is a natural Loch on Queenside Muir in the hills above Lochwinnoch. A small embankment was created which raised the level of water and also allowed a sluice to be installed to control the flow of water. It has a surface area of 19.6 acres and an area of some 160 acres of moorland drains into it. The volume of water impounded is 42 million gallons and the drainage area is capable of supplying 313,000 gallons per day. The montage below gives a general view of the loch (top left) and top right shows the “gap” that the embankment filled in. The remaining photographs give a better impression of the scale of the dam wall.

After McDowalls bankruptcy and death Charles Selkrig was appointed by an act of Parliament as executor of the estate. In 1814 the term of the contact between McDowall, Houston and Burns ended. Selkrig was then able to organise the sale of the Calderpark Mill and set a price of £6000. This included 30 acres of ground at Caldercrook for the purpose of constructing a reservoir. It also allowed for all material necessary for its construction and to keep it in good repair to be taken from the surrounding area free of charge and no payment or recompense for damage to the moor. This led to the construction of the Calder Dam, a completely artificial body of water. The embankment impounding the water was about 330 yards long. Its surface area was 22.06 acre and it held 27 million gallons. 1970 acres of moorland drained into it and with 42 inches of rain per annum the drainage area could supply 5,143,000 gallon per day. These two reservoirs are shown in the map below. I have no photographs of the Calder Dam when it retained water; it was destroyed in the 1970’s.

The photograph below was taken from the road looking across the moor in the direction of Calder Dam. The scaring it created on the moor used to be much more visible. From this viewpoint the dam has all but disappeared. I’ve marked the rough location of the retaining embankment with a red line.

Very little of the embankment remains. The short section that does is at the corner where the sluice was located (bottom right hand corner of the dam depicted in the map above). The montage below shows the remaining embankment and at its end a dip where the sluice was located. The bottom photograph was taken from the other side of the dip looking upstream to where the water was inundated. It was clearly quite a shallow expanse of water but by all accounts, catching 3lb trout was not uncommon.

The exact date construction of the dam started or was completed is not known. However a “Minute Book” was kept recording decisions that were taken regarding the dam, in particular expenditure. This record was started on 14th June 1823. In 1824 the proprietors of the Calderpark and Calderhaugh mill agree to raise the height of the bye-wash by 3 feet which will leave it 3 feet below the top of the embankment. Mr Wright was charged with overseeing this work. The dam caused some consternation from Major Harvey, the new owner of Castle Semple and owner of Muirshiel who demanded to know what was going on in a letter dated 3rd July 1826. Why it took him 3 years to become concerned will remain one of life’s little mysteries. Controversy over the dam continued into 1828 with a letter dated 21st February 1828 demanding the removal of the dam. This petition to William Wright of Calderpark mill was raised by William Fulton of Easter Cloak (Balgreen), William Montgomery of Meikle Cloak and John Donald of Tandlemuir. Their objection was based on riparian rights, I suspect as a lever to get some money out of the mill owners. The dam would not impact their rights as it did not abstract water or materially impact the flow. How the dispute was settled is not known but clearly it was as the dam survived into the 1970’s.

Having said the dam survived into the 1970, that was after two breaches of the embankment, the first occurring on 3rd December 1831 when the embankment gave way flooding 500 acres in the valley below, the second in 1905. In the 1905 incident a section 10-15 yards across in the line of the river gave way gouging the river bed down to bedrock. I have not found any report of flooding due to this breach. Perhaps the narrowness of the breach restricted the flow of escaping water just enough for the Calder to cope with the torrent. The montage below comprises photographs of the location of the breach looking upstream and downstream. It is striking how straight the river is in both directions.

A newspaper report on the 1831 incident is shown below. One has to wonder if raising the bye-wash 3 feet barely a year after the dam was first built (see above) was over ambitious leading to its failure. There are no reports of the compensation the mill owners were required to pay. They met on 21st April 1832 to discuss the failure which they ascribed to very heavy rainfall. They decided to double the length of the bye-wash to 100ft and maintain that the water flowing over it should not exceed 1 foot in depth. It was also resolved to keep the sluice open from October to February.

The dam had been built for the benefit of the cotton mills. However, even after the mills were gone arguments over the use of the water continued. In April 1885 the owners of the Barytes mine began operations to make use of the water from the Queenside loch and Calder Dam. The Crawford Brothers who owned both the Calderpark and Calderhaugh mills by this time dismantled these structures. The mine owners obtained an interdict to stop such interference and in 1886 Crawford Brothers went to Court to stop the owners of the Barytes mine from using the water from both Calder dam and Queenside loch. The case was finally concluded on 4th June 1887. The claim was dismissed as the use of the water by the mine did not interfere with the servitude right the Mills had for the water – especially as the Calderpark mill had burned down 10 years earlier and had not been rebuilt. The photograph below is off a small dam built under the bridge crossing the Calder where the mine had built their processing plant. This is probably the structure the mine had to rebuild.

The Crawford Brothers were not done with the mine and Calder dam. From June 1899 through to the end of 1900 there is a series of exchanges between them and Mr Bates proprietor of Muirshiel. The subject of debate is maintenance of the dam and where responsibility lies in the event of a failure of the dam. Responsibility is complicated by the rights the Crawfords have, the fact a third party is operating the dam under a lease, the proprietors’ obligations and to make it more complicated the fact part of the reservoir and part of the embankment are on another estate, Duchal, that part of which the Crawford brothers are the tenants. Crawfords concerns are well founded because in 1905 a section of the embankment on the line of the river between 10-15 yards wide gave way. The dam emptied and the breach was scoured down to the bedrock. I have not found out how the ensuing fallout was resolved. In a 1921 report on the condition of various water infrastructures on the Calder it is stated that because of the 1905 breach the water cannot rise to any appreciable  extend therefore possess no flooding risk. Clearly the dam was not repaired. At some point after this it was repaired because I remember seeing the dam full on walks up to the mine in the 1960’s.

The final major construction on the Calder is the Black Dam. This was built by the Castle Semple estate for the benefit of the Calder Glen Corn and Wool Mill which was owned by the estate but leased to tenants for its operation. The exact date of construction is unknown but it was referenced in the Sale of the mill to James Adam in 1814.

The 1856 map on the right identifies the location of the Black Dam. The arrow pointing to the 1808 map shows the Black Dam location at that time. In fact it did not exist in 1808 and in the location where it will be you can see the river splits in two and creates an island at this point in the river. The Black Dam is created by building an embankment to prevent the water rejoining the main stream. This provides storage capacity for times of low river flow. Control of the water back into the Calder is achieved via a sluice gate built into the embankment. The montage below shows various aspects of the Black Dam. The bottom right image shows the outflow from the sluice. Its position confirms the Black Dam was built before the Wooden Dam Breast discussed below. The outflow will be submerged when the Wooden Dam Breast is built.

The Black Dam covers an area of 0.25 acre and at the time of the survey in 1899 if it was cleared of mud had a capacity of 329,000 gallons.

The Wooden Dam Breast (photograph below) is adjacent to the Black Dam and is not included in the survey. Why it was not included is unknown. Perhaps it was considered de minimus. In the top right corner of the photograph can be seen two white streaks - this is water overflowing the embankment of the Black Dam. It was built at the time the Calderbank bleachfield mill was constructed. The Weir created by this dam fed the water into the Calderbank lade.

Close to the Wooden Dam Breast and the Black Dam are the ruins of a three apartment cottage. One suggestion is it was a shepherds house. Seems unlikely given its location in a wooded glen. Another is it was associated with the water infrastructure being discussed. It was not present in the 1856 map and first appeared in the map dated 1895. Even it was built in 1857 all of the water infrastructure had been operating for a number of years by that time. Why it was built and who lived there will probably remain a mystery. I have included it here more as a matter of completeness rather than its significance. The montage below shows its location and two photographs taken in the direction of the arrow. The top photograph is an internal view and the remnants of the two internal dividing walls are just visible. The bottom photograph is an external view showing just how derelict and overgrown the site has become.

The next major water infrastructure is the Kaim Dam which flows via the Kaim burn and Cloakburn into the Calder. Hugh Crawford who was the last owner of the Calderpark Mill retained the Kaim water rights till around 1919. The reservoir has a surface area of around 27 acres and a capacity of 51 million gallons. An area of 278 acres drains into the reservoir and with an annual rainfall of 36 inches can yield 622,000 gallons daily.

A smaller dam was also located on this water system, Boghead Dam located on the Cloak burn. Little remains of this dam which had a surface area of 0.25 acre and a capacity of 201,000 gallons, which the 1899 survey suggested could be increased to 329,000 gallons if cleared of mud.

The final piece of water infrastructure was the Garpel dam which powered a small sawmill and the Bleachfield of Hamilton Adam. It was very small with a surface area around 0.1 acre. The montage below shows that the reservoir area is completely silted up (top section). In the 60’s and 70’s this was still a fair sized pool with small trout. The bottom section is the small dam wall that created the reservoir. After a short distance the outflow reaches the Calder.

More recent infrastructure on the Calder is the abstraction inlet taking water to the Kaim dam. It is located 500m upstream from the bridge crossing the river on the Muirshiel mine road, in total about 1km from the visitor centre. The Kaim may be in a different catchment area to the Calder and the environment agency now prohibits new schemes from carrying out cross catchment transfers of water courses in order to avoid contamination. The Calder’s marine life has never been the same since this abstraction started. There will be a compensation flow which should ensure a minimum of water sufficient to maintain river quality. Whether this was set too low or there is chemical run-off from farming (which I doubt given the nature of the surrounding farming) something has decimated the river.  I was usually always able to put a meal on the table when I went fishing for trout. Now you hardly even see minnows let alone nests of lampreys. The photographs below show the abstraction point. 

In the early 1980’s there was a proposal to build a large-scale dam in the Calder Glen. It was to be located about 450m up the Glen from Clovenstone Cottage. The overflow level was set at 228m and the rockfill embankment would be around 445m wide and 58m high at the lowest point in the span. The surface area of the reservoir would be around 105 hectares and would be around 680m wide at its widest point. It would be 2.8km long stopping just short of the Muirshiel weir (the first (collapsed) bridge you pass when leaving the visitor centre and heading up the mine road. The volume of water impounded would be 20,200,000 cubic meters or 20.2 million tonnes or in old money 4,443,369,042 gallons ie 4.4 billion gallons.

That makes it 165 times larger than the old Calder Dam discussed earlier which had a devastating effect on the village when it failed. We have all probably seen the water surging out of the dam in Ukraine that was destroyed. It was in a fairly flat area. This dam is high up a steep valley which would add to the force of the water as it picked up speed heading for the village.

When I was a Director at Scottish and Southern Energy I was responsible for the first large scale hydro scheme to be built in the UK for the previous 50 years. It was a pumped storage scheme in the Monadhliath mountains above Loch Ness. When designing the power tunnel it was imperative to ensure there was enough rock head above the tunnel or the water pressure could blast a hole out through the mountain. In a jet engine the temperatures are close to the melting point of the super alloys used in their design. If the cooling fails these materials would lose their engineering strength with devastating effects. A jet engine and a dam are both complex structures designed with high margins of safety due to the potential catastrophic effects if either failed. I’m sure the dam proposed for the Calder Glen, had it gone ahead, would have been perfectly safe. It didn’t go ahead, the residents of Lochwinnoch can sleep easy in their beds knowing there isn’t 20.2 million tonnes of water with a very very very slight chance of bearing down on them.

At this point you might be saying to yourself "Aye all very well but the earlier dam on the Calder did fail with devastating effects. So much for your margins of safety." Fair point, but remember, very shortly after it was built they raised the bye-wash by 3 feet undermining the design leading to the subsequent failure.

I’ve mapped out the location of the proposed dam following the 225m contour as it was a thick line I could see (!!!) rather than try and follow 228m.