The lost railways at our door

We have lived in Donmouth for about 17 years now, long enough to have found interesting details in the landscape. Soon after we arrived, back when the salmon nets still went up and around the time I actually found a sea lamprey on the beach, I also found a century-old brick emerging from the sand. At the time I didn’t realize how old it was. In April, with the new grass growing and the light falling slantwise, I was able to take this photograph of an old railway grade running through the Royal Aberdeen Golf Club—you can still see where the sleepers rested. Other folks have already done the hard research to connect all these objects together; here I want to draw on that research to consider the material history of Donmouth and what transport was like here between 1900 and 1950.

If you were to look East from the war memorial at the corner of Balgownie Road and the Ellon Road now, as many commuters do each morning, you would see an oddly shaped building which is now a funeral parlour. Up until 1925, just behind this was the southern terminus of the Strabathie Light Railway, also known as the Murcar Railway. It was built by the Seaton Brick and Tile Company in 1899 and ran from the North end of the Bridge of Don, along the western edge of the Royal Aberdeen Golf Club grounds, to Seaton’s new brickworks at Strabathie, at the northern edge of what is now the Murcar Links golf course. The photograph above is taken along the straight stretch of road between the Ladies’ Golf Club and the groundskeeper’s house and workshop.

While the Strabathie Light Railway had its terminus on the north side of the Bridge of Don, the Aberdeen Corporation Tramways had theirs on the south side. The wonderful website on Scottish bricks, which is a labour of research love if ever there was one, has a thoroughly documented history of the Seaton brickworks. If one reads down to the entries for 1899, one learns that the Aberdeen Corporation considered quite seriously a plan to support extending the Strabathie brickworks line all the way to Newburgh. Although this proposal didn’t go forward, an agreement was made with the Murcar Links golf course to carry golfers, and it seems that there was other passenger traffic as well.

This was a 3′ narrow gauge railway, and its first engine was an 0-4-0T engine drawing tram carriages. Although it was built for the brickyard, it also carried passengers to the Murcar Links golf course. The 1902 OS map from shows the sidings at the Bridge of Don end of the line.

The Seaton Brick and Tile Company shut down in 1924, but the railway and the terminus found new lives. The golf course took over the railway, but because it was now a single line serving passengers they had no need of the sidings in Bridge of Don or the track running past Murcar Links to Black Dog. The yard was sold to John Joss, who managed quarries as well as lorries and taxis. In 1925, he built a new house next to his yard. On 21 April 1943, during the Second World War, a stray bomb from a German bombing raid on the Gordon Highlanders barracks landed in the Joss yard, destroying many of their lorries. His son Gerald took over the business and ran it all the way to 2000, when it was sold as a going concern. The works yard was sold off and redeveloped as flats, but the house, which looks unlike anything else in Donmouth, is still there, and still has shrapnel scars on the woodwork.

A neighbour whose family has lived in Donmouth since the 1930s told me that his father and grandfather both remembered the railway, which ran until 1951; and the Aberdeen City Corporation trams lasted a few more years, finally shutting down in 1959. Both are visible in the aerial photo below. To get a partial sense of the connectedness of Donmouth in the early 20th century, use the amazing Rail Map Online site – you will need to zoom in onto the mouth of the Don River, and then turn on the layers for ‘trams’ and ‘industry’. But even with all that…you won’t get the historic cycle paths.

In the 1930s Donmouth became a suburban development: dozens of small bungalows were built along new roads. The light railway still ran. When the Gordon Barracks were built, or around that time, the Ministry of Transport took the opportunity to redesign the main road northwards for modern transport. As Carlton Reid wrote, ” Between 1934 and 1940, Britain’s Ministry of Transport would only give fat grants to road-building schemes if they included wide, protected cycleways on each side of the road” – following the Dutch model. Hence, the A90 north of Donmouth, past the Gordon Barracks and all the way to Murcar, still has a lovely segregated cycle lane, though the cycle lanes from the Brig o’ Don through Donmouth were apparently ripped out when the dual carriageway went in.

Looking out the window of my office now, I stare down into a concrete gorge overflowing with motor traffic. Cyclists have fought for decades for a protected route running all the way from Bridge of Don into Aberdeen city, and we’ve been told to use the pavements, which infuriates the few pedestrians that can brave the 90-100dB sound levels on the Brig o’Don. For us, who live in Donmouth, there is literally no safe way to walk or cycle into town—every possible route involves an unprotected crossing through a busy road—and with autistic folk in the family, that is a challenge. Yet when the planners and council officials insist that we are asking the impossible, in the face of environmental disaster, it is worth looking back. Before the oil came to Aberdeen, we had a sensible integrated transport network with protected bicycle lanes and a mix of public and private light railways—even here in Donmouth!