Edinburgh, Cramond Island Battery, No.1 Engine Room

Concrete and brick built building. It has been vandalised.

Site recorded by GUARD during the Coastal Assessment Survey for Historic Scotland, 'The Firth of Forth from Dunbar to the Coast of Fife' 10th March 1996..

The Second World War gun battery on Cramond Island was equipped with two engine houses, No.1 being situated on high ground 40m SW of the 12-pounder gun emplacement (NT17NE 71.02). The building is more or less identical to No.2 Engine House (NT17NE 71.05) but differs in its internal arrangement. Rectangular on plan, it measures 9.17m from E to W by 5.64m transversely within brick walls 0.45m thick. These rise to a high flat roof supported by thick concrete beams. The top of the roof has been camouflaged with a layer of grass held in place around the edges by a low brick revetment. Most of this cover remains in place though much of the brickwork has now gone. The only doorway is 1.85m wide and is located close to the E end of the N side. All four walls contain windows, some containing their original frames, and there are blocks of narrow vents immediately below the roof, some of which retain their external louvred covers.

The interior originally contained four rectangular concrete plinths measuring about 0.3m in height and once supporting diesel engines, but the two plinths closest to the ESE end have been removed down to the level of the concrete floor. Accompanying these plinths is a system of 0.3m wide channels in the floor which are linked via apertures at the foot of the walls to an external drain. The exhausts from the diesel engines were vented through the SSW wall where there was a wide aperture aligned with each of the plinths. The internal wall-faces especially, but also the external ones, are liberally covered with graffiti, some of it very modern. The internal walls also bear traces of the original paint. On the date of visit nothing was seen in dense undergrowth of the building that is known to have stood immediately E of the engine house and was of similar length.

Visited by HES Archaeological Survey (J. Sherriff, A. McCaig) 31 August 2022.

HES surveyed engine house No. 1 at Cramond Battery on 30 August 2022 with tape and laser measurer at scale of 1:100. The resultant plan was redrawn in vector graphics software at a scale of 1:100.

Recording Scotland's graffiti project was designed to review the range of historic and contemporary graffiti art across Scotland. It involved desk-based assessment and fieldwork at a number of example sites, to consider recording methodologies and dissemination practices.

Between 2016 and 2017, phase 1 of the project aimed to:

Aim 1: review a range of historic and contemporary graffiti art from across Scotland, already present in Canmore.

Aim2: undertake a research review of previous approaches to recording graffiti art in Canmore and other HERs, review and develop the current Thesaurus terms.

Aim 3: test and develop a range of recording methods within the following programmes or projects: Discovering the Clyde programme (1223), Scotland’s Urban Past (1222), Architecture and Industry projects, such as Urban Recording Projects (1028), Area Photographic Survey (311) and the Tomintoul and Glenlivet Landscape Partnership (1167).

Aim 4: the following test sites will be considered for research into the range of historic and contemporary graffiti. They will be analysed to demonstrate the different ages, contexts, styles and survivals of historic and contemporary graffiti: Polphail village (Canmore ID 299112), Scalan farmstead (170726), Cowcaddens Subway Station (243099), Croick Parish Church (12503), Dalbeattie Armament Depot (76279) and Dumbarton Rock (43376).

Aim 5: to research the potential for social media to play a role in crowd-sourcing information and archiving Scotland’s graffiti art.

In 2017-2019, phase 2 of the project aimed to:

Aim 1: To enhance the NRHE to the point at which it can be said to adequately represent the broad range of historic and modern graffiti that is evident throughout Scotland, and to explore ways by which that information can best be disseminated.

Aim 2: To develop guidelines that will convey the HES approach to researching and recording graffiti.

Aim 3: To write a specification for a book on Scotland’s graffiti.

Aim 4: To develop external partnerships to explore further ways to record graffiti and to identify and explore potential funding streams to enable further knowledge exchange and research.

The project was managed by Dr Alex Hale, with contributions from staff across Herirtage and Commercial and Tourism directorates.