Monday, January 28, 2019

Restoration - Week 36 - 1 Year In!!

A year now into our restoration of the ground and thanks again to more clearance work from the Council's team we have all sections of the terracing basically cleaned up!!

As you can see from these photos the ground has not looked as good as this for years and we are delighted with the progress thus far. Been back-breaking work at times but more determined than

ever before to continue this work and get the old place back to proper usage. I reckon the Council's help has saved about a year's work from CPL and although the terracing in the South-East corner

is in very poor condition, it can now be accessed once again and with the trees now bare of leaves the place does really feel like a 'sleeping' old football stadium once more and far better an experience


for those wishing to visit Cathkin Park. Hopefully now we can push on with fundraising to get to the next phase of our work and start replacing some of the missing concrete between the terrace steps.


But for now enjoy the pics and thank you for all the interest, support, comments and 'likes' on our social media pages and for all of the recent press coverage. Much appreciated!

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Restoration - Week 35

Back to Cathkin again this week and worked on the East Terracing once again as well as cleaning more of the terrace stonework we managed to get another 5 foot section of the pitch wall cleared of moss and old paint in preparation for repainting this month.


The Council have cleared the leaves from the North End and the ground does really look much improved in this last 11 months of work. Cleaned another 2 x 1/3 sections of terrace steps and filled with blaes and got some weeding done on this same section.


The running track is again looking rough so decided to crack on with levelling and clearing it as well and recycling the top layer to again rebuild our planned 'Spion Kop' on the old stand-side as this will provide a firmer base on which to refashion a rudimentary Victorian terrace in the years to come.


But as you can see it's slow work but does massively improve the track surface and we aim to get most of the 400 yard track levelled and cleared by the end of this year which will make it far safer to run on once again. This is a track that the likes of Willie Maley and Harry McNeill raced on late in the 19th Century and deserves to be restored to a functioning surface again.


Delighted with how the old pitch wall has turned out following a three days of intensive scrubbing! And depending on the weather we will start repainting it in sections as we restore each small part of this East Terrace. We also began to replace the top surface of grass at this end of the ground which


was damaged previously but replaced with stone chip which has prevented the grass from regrowing. There is a broken drain underneath which has allowed the ground to flood at this East corner but the grass should now recover with our mix of turf over the top in all the 'bald' areas. So, almost a year into the restoration we are on track to make further repairs and improvements to the ground in 2019.

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