Restoration - Week 15

Lovely weather again so cracked on with cleaning the remaining stonework in the crumbling East Terracing and cleared another 4 bags of rubbish from this section. The park is busy during the summer but with not enough bins around the drinkers leave their bottles and cans strewn around the ground and it is a pain in the arse cleaning up after them. But hey-ho, needs must..

I am concentrating on the East end of Cathkin now for the summer as it needs the most work and is most at risk of being lost forever due to nature's progress and years of vandalism. Once this section has been cleaned up and refilled I will move to the last section of the ground, the much maligned SE corner terrace which has almost disappeared this year!

Very tough going this week but managed to cut away lots of growth and rubbish to clear the first 4 steps and another 4 sections of the long-gone terracing and polished the stone underneath. Already looking far better than before but a MAMMOTH job ahead to get this entire section done in the next 3 months...!

However I'm delighted with the difference already and although only a small part of the terrace is done I have had a great reaction from the local community to the work completed so far. Thanks to Jim Simmonette for the photo below!

But this is slow work, down and dirty with small wire brush, dulled knife, trowel and shovel and small saw to cut away the surviving 'ankle-breaker' tree roots! I am inching my way along the EAST Terrace, which eventually we will rename 'The Queens Park End' in honour of the first tenants from

1884 til 1903. We will rename the former SOUTH Enclosure as 'The Third Lanark Terrace' in memory of their custody of the ground between 1903 and 1967 and the WEST Terrace will become 'The Jimmy Johnston End' in honour of their 9 years here so far. The crush barriers will be repainted to remember each team's colours which will also really bring the old place back to life.

The pitch wall has now had 30 feet of moss cleaned and scraped off and a path once again cut all across this section of terracing and we will repair the crumbling pitch wall and repaint later in the year. This however encourages more vandalism as I found to my cost 8 years ago when I repainted the entire ground, to have it tagged and ruined within 48 hours! (see below photo from 2011)

Determined that this time we will defeat the vandals and return this Grand Old Lady Of Scottish Sporting History to a recognizable arena once again. But as I said before, this is an incredibly slow process and we are making incremental improvements to the remaining structures and have no real end point. This is a true labour of love but am convinced that we can save the ground for future

generations to enjoy. There is simply too much history here in multiple sports for us to sit idly by and watch as it crumbles into nothing. There are dozens of lost grounds in Britain but none had the same heritage as this Second Hampden. For too long it has been neglected and we will not give up on it and have a very clear vision of how Cathkin Park should eventually look, with minimal expense but lots of time and hard graft! And great to have the Community Service lads back this week to help out.

Photograph above is courtesy of actor Colin McCredie on Twitter on his first visit to the ground. So now 4 out of the 5 remaining terraces are being cleared and preserved bit by bit and delighted to have helped transform the look of the ground so much already since January 2018, as this photo below

shows, 'before' and 'after' we cleaned the stonework this week. We are also trying to recycle what materials we can and utilise what is already there, so have in-filled the missing terrace concrete with red blaes from the currently overgrown and unusable running track around the pitch. I repaired the first broken kerbstone below and knocked it back into place before filling with ash and pleased with

the result! This is only a temporary 'fix' until we have cleaned up the whole Queens Park End and then we will re-concrete later in the year. Thanks for all the comments & support and please follow our Twitter account for daily updates and much more about the history of the ground @CathkinPark