snorbens_caleyman

So I've been in the neighbourhood, but not actually there.

Only one solution then - political vetting of anyone attempting to buy a season ticket

And another. Bonus points for identifying the ship!

Have just discovered, thanks to the mailing list The Loop, that this was 50 years ago today - Saturday 18 July 1970.

Snorbens' one IS Brodie Castle!

Sticking with the castle theme...

Aha! It's Moniack. Do they still produce wine? I used to be partial to their birch sap brew

No idea - but I'm sure that IBM will tell us what the car is

You guys are good! The reason my Dad took that photograph was that he had several times stayed at the house on the shores of the loch, just right of centre in his picture. I stayed there once. It used to be - and for all I know may still be - the residence of the head gamekeeper on that estate. In the 1940s, that was my father's uncle. His son, my father's cousin, succeeded him. We had a family holiday there in the late 60s. I have photographs of the place from the 40s, 50s and 60s. The estate was owned by Anne Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster, who was, of course, absolutely stinking rich. When we were there in the 60s, I saw her arrive by her usual mode of transport - seaplane "landing" on Loch More. An Irish lady who was very much into horseracing, two of her most famous horses bore the names of mountains on her land - Arkle and Foinavon [sic].

Another of my Dad's photgraphs from some time in the 1990s. There's a little personal story behind it, which I'll relate once you've identified the location.

My Mum is from Nairn, and well remembers the airfield at Brackla. Towards the end of the war, they were flying planes directly from the factory up to Brackla, and immediately scrapping them. She also told me that scrapped planes were buried not far from where she lived in Nairn, alongside Nairn Dunbar golf club. If you Google for Kingsteps Quarry, you will see that a few years ago they checked it for radioactivity.

It is indeed the B9006 at Leanach, between Culloden Moor and the railway. That field and the housing estate used to be an airfield! I assume you have heard of the legendary Captain Fresson and Highland Airways, which he founded in the 1930s. (You'll have seen the statue at Inverness Airport, and possibly the memorials at Kirkwall and Sumburgh.) He operated from the airfield at the Longman - close by the ICT stadium - but had this field as his designated emergency landing ground for when the lower-lying Longman was fog-bound. During WW2, the RAF took over the airfield, and initially used it as a satellite landing ground (SLG) for Lossiemouth. The idea behind SLGs is that the planes from a bigger airfield could be dispersed to smaller, camouflaged grass-strip fields, in case of attack on the main field. Leanach had Hurricanes, Defiants, Beaufighters and even Wellington bombers. However, they had a problem with brightly coloured civilian planes using it too, so they had to ban them because they compromised the camouflage. There was also an RAF unit at Dalcross, and later in the war they too used Leanach as a relief landing ground. The airfield was eventually de-requisitioned in March 1945. That hut, which is still there accornding to Google Street View, is an RAF building. My Dad, being an Innes Street lad and a teenager during the war, used to hang about the Longman airfield, and occasionally cadged a flight on a plane. I also know that he and my Mum once flew with Fresson, which would have been in the early to mid 1950s, when Fresson had a private charter business. Hence the photograph!

Aw, gie's a break! You could at least have pretended to wait for a while Right, here's one of my Dad's, from 1994 or 1995. The area looks a little different now, but it should still be fairly easy. The question is why my Dad would take such a boring looking photograph. There's a clue in the picture, and it's still there today.

Since I haven't a clue about most of these, I might as well put in one that I know. Where is this bloke and his headless companion?

Granny's Heilan' Hame.

Which is why I said at the start - and still do - that declaring the season null and void was the logical thing to do. No promotion, no relegation. Prize money could be problematic - split it equally in a division, and teams at the top will moan, split it according to place (or points-per-game) at suspension, and teams at the bottom will moan. But nothing insurmountable. Qualification for Europe could have been based on position - that doesn't seem to have caused any problems. 14-10-10-10 is a reasonable alternative, but, as I suspected, once the Central Belt numpties find out where Brora actually is, they are not so keen.

Thanks. I might have another look at my Dad's photographs. I did have "Inverness Remembered" in the back of my mind when I originally scanned in all his pictures, but I didn't think that they were good enough. However, those above have been through just the lightest of processing with a very old version of Photoshop - brightness, colour balance and minimal sharpening - and improved immensely. My Dad himself has appeared in "Inverness Remembered" a few times - usually old Boys Brigade pictures - and my grandfather, aunt and uncle, and sister have all been in it. About time we gave something back!

I was simply thinking that as soon as they start playing, they will start losing (more) money, because of the inevitable expenses - travel, opening up the stadium even for closed door matches, and so on. With no income, a shorter season would mean losing less money, and could literally be the difference between survival and liquidation for some clubs.

Finally, from the same film as the Rose Street pictures, here is Inglis Street and what was once the Playhouse Cinema.

From another film, but around the same time, here are views on Railway Terrace.

For comparison, the picture below is from 15th April 2001. By comparing maps, I once worked out that our flat at the top of George Street - or the garage in the pictures above - would have been just about where the lamp-post and parked car are in the bottom left of the picture.

The shop at the top of Innes Street, and the view down Innes Street. Below - looking down Rose Street towards Academy Street, past the top of George Street. I am sure that the garage used to be further along - there is an am baile photograph from the 1950s which shows the block that I used to live in, and the distinctive Esso sign in front of the garage closer to Academy Street. The garage was always known to me as Robertson's garage, being owned by a relative of my father of that name - Jack or possibly John Robertson.

Following on from a picture in the "Anyone Recognise?" thread, these are pictures of the demolition of the area around Rose Street, Innes Street and Railway Terrace, in preparation for the new railway bridge, road system and superstore which are now there. I think that they were taken in around 1988 or 1989. My late father lived in Innes Street when he was young. His father was born on Shore Street, played for Citadel, and worked all his life in Walker's Sawmill at the harbour. The community in that area was very close. The first picture below confused me for a while. It's on Rose Street, with the multi-storey car park on the right, looking past the top of George Street, towards the Longman. When I was very young, in the late 50s and up to 1960 or 61, we lived in a flat at the corner of Rose Street and George Street, just where the blue building - the garage - is. I don't remember, but it must be that the building with the flats was demolished and the garage, which used to be further along towards Academy Street, moved to the top of George Street.

Correct! I thought the giveaway would be the railway station canopy that you can see on the right in the second picture. This is the Falcon Foundry, established in 1858 by one John Falconer. As you can see, it was edge-on to the station, roughly where the western end of Eastgate 2 is now. When Eastgate 2 was built, it was dismantled and then reconstructed a few yards to the south-west and rotated by 90 degrees, to form one side of the new square, which was named after the foundry.

Another one from about three years later, which contains a giveaway.