I took my photos of this over a year ago and have only just got around to posting them.

The Loch Lomond Hotel is in the village of Balloch which as its name suggests is at the foot of Loch Lomond. The loch is only five or so minutes from the hotel.

Balloch and Loch Lomond are only a few miles from Dumbarton.

This one shows the doorway with its nice rounded portico but the windows have been mucked about with.

These two old postcards show how it used to look. It seems once (in the 1960s, judging by the cars) to have had a pointed pediment above the doorway.

Edited to add:- some more of my photos of the hotel are on my flickr.

Hampden Park 10/8/11

I know this is a bit late but I only saw the highlights of this game. It looked like we were hammered 1-2. Denmark made much the more and better chances but Scotland scored two and they didn’t.

The first came from a free kick where the Scot, were he a Dane, might have been described as going down too easily.

Allan McGregor flapped at the equaliser. It was like watching Stephen Grindlay.

Scotland’s second was a finely worked effort, though.

A win’s a win. I’d have taken it in any Dumbarton game.

Whether there will be a similar result against the Czech Rep in the upcoming qualifying game is another matter.

I don’t know how I missed this before, I suppose I was so used to it I never looked properly. The picture is a stitch of two to get it all in. I took them after the game against the Shire last Sunday. We took a turn along the High Street and I gazed up at the Co-Op building and noticed its date; DECS 1938. This building was where the linen, drapery, furniture and clothing depts were. It had those pnuematic pipes for sending your cash off to the central office where all the money was dealt with. The food department was (and still is) a bit further along the High Street. Strangely, there the money was handled at the till by the assistants.

(For anyone who doesn’t know, DECS stands for Dumbarton Equitable Co-Operative Society and the elephant is on Dumbarton’s town crest.)

I’ve got one more photo of the Co-Op on flickr.

I can still remember my mother’s Co-Op dividend number…..

In Great Britain there are War Memorials – mainly to the Great War and the Second World War – in even the smallest towns and villages. Sometimes when you’re driving along in the countryside there will be one at the edge of a field; covered in names even though there appears to be no habitation worthy of the name round about.

I’ve also come across them on walls in churches, police and railway stations (does anyone know what happened to the memorial at Dumbarton East when they demolished the old buildings?) and Post Offices commemorating the former workers who “gave their lives.”

It’s always striking that the number of dead for World War 1 outstrips that of World War 2 – perhaps a reflection of the fact that, after 1916 till late 1918, the greater burden of the Allies in the Great War lay on Britain and its Empire, while in WW2 most of the fighting after 1941 was done by the USSR and the US.

I spent a fortnight in Germany 30 years ago and was tremendously saddened by the war memorial in the town where I was staying. The sacrifice seemed even more poignant because they lost (and, of course, in WW2 had no shred of excuse nor reason to fight.)

I have already posted pictures of Kirkcaldy’s War Memorial.

There is another war memorial in Kirkcaldy, though, one which is fairly unusual.

It is to the local dead of the Spanish Civil War; members of the International Brigade who came from Fife or the Lothians. That conflict preceded and presaged the greater anti-fascist fight of WW2. Arguably had France and Great Britain taken the government side in that war then the later, bigger war might have been averted. But Britain at least was in no mood to fight (think of all those names on the WW1 memorials) and was also unprepared (no Spitfires for example.) This was still more or less true by the time of the Munich crisis in 1938. But failure to stand up to him on both those occasions and also during the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the 1938 Anschluss encouraged Hitler to believe we never would.

Here is the memorial in situ. It stands just off Forth Avenue, quite near Kirkcaldy railway station.

The main plaque is inscribed as below.

These are the names just above the plaque.

There are more on the plinth below the shield.

This is the shield. The mounted knight is an old emblem representing Fife.

It’s strange to think that had the Western European powers fought in Spain and helped the Spanish Republic to victory, a Nazi Germany would, paradoxically, likely have survived long past 1945.

I took these when I was over in May for the Elgin game. That now seems long ago and oh so far away.

They are all in the High Street or corner onto it.

This is Woolies. Note the similarities with the Dundee former Woolies I posted a while back.

Burton’s. Firmly in the house style.

Former Claude Alexander’s clothing store. Just across Quay Street from Burton’s.

Former City Bakeries building. The windows used to be lovely but they’ve been messed about.

After the game on Saturday I took a trip down to the quay at Dumbarton. I’ve always liked the fact there are loads of swans on the river there.

I’d never seen a black one before, though. It was swimming all on its own.

Black Swan in River Leven

The good lady said it had flown in from Russia or somewhere and wouldn’t find a mate as it’s a different species from the white ones.

It’s actually more of a deep brown colour than black. It’s a beautiful thing with a red beak and striking red eyes.

Another fruit of my “Doon The Watter” trip.

This shot was taken from the south Bank of the Clyde almost at Langbank. The tide was out, showing the rocky foreshore.

Dumbarton FC’s stadium is immediately behind the Castle Rock as you look at it from here.

This photo shows a cloud shrouded Ben Lomond (the only Munro I have ever climbed) in the background.

There actually is an angle, just west of Langbank, I glimpsed it on my way back down later in the day but I was on a motorway and couldn’t stop, where the Castle Rock does look like a recumbent elephant. Hence the Elephant And Castle pub in Dumbarton High Street – now closed I believe – and the football club badge. I had always thought it was Dumbuck that was supposed to be elephant-like but it is the Rock after all.

This picture shows the Rock from Greenock. I seem by accident to have caught a seabird on the wing.