IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Levenhowe Road, ALEXANDRIA, G83 8LS

This is a road bridge over the River Leven that runs out of the south end of Loch Lomond in Balloch, Scotland.

The waters formed by the confluence of the Carrochan Burn and Ballagan Burn empty into the river here. The houses to either side are alongside Levenhowe Road (left) and Honeysuckle Lane (right); for the latter, see Image

View of Dalvait Road from Main Street Jamestown. Only the Pink House on the right with the Post Box was built pre-1980

The intake is near the centre of the image, where a stone structure (a "skimmer" – compare Image), projecting into the River Leven, serves to direct some of the river's flow into the lade. The lade was built to serve the nearby dye works; for the latter, see Image and Image For a view along the lade from its intake, see Image and Image

Some panels on the Leven Valley Heritage Trail, installed about 30 years earlier, had recently been replaced after having long been in poor condition. One of those replacements is shown at Image As also mentioned there, some entirely new panels were added to the trail, these being mounted on stainless steel structures of the same size and shape as the original stone ones; as the present picture shows, the mountings appeared before the panels did. The River Leven and Image appear in the background.

This is one of a total of eleven crossings of the River Leven, of which three cannot be used by pedestrians: (1) this barrage, which has a footpath on top behind locked gates; (2) the Black Bridge (Image), which had long been closed when this picture was taken, and which was later removed altogether; and (3) the railway bridge at Dumbarton. The eleven crossings therefore consist of ten bridges, and this barrage, which is not a bridge. Speaking of the Central Water Development Board, and their use of Loch Lomond in providing water for the central belt of Scotland, John Mitchell's book "Loch Lomondside" (in the New Naturalist series) mentions this barrage: "The Loch Lomond Water Scheme, which involved controlling the natural discharge from the loch by means of a barrage across the River Leven, was officially opened on 29 June 1971. Through its pumping station at Ross Priory on the loch's southern shore, the Board was given the authority to abstract up to 455 megalitres (100 million gallons) of water per day, providing the level of the loch does not fall below 6.7 m (22 ft) OD". The barrage has seven separate gates, hinged at the base; they can be raised by electrically-operated pulleys and steel ropes. Though designed to be controlled by a computer system, the barrage is instead operated manually [Reference: the paper "Water management of Loch Lomond – What does the future hold?" by Owen Bramwell (Scottish Water, Edinburgh)]. ["OD" here refers to a standard, called Ordnance Datum Newlyn, which the Ordnance Survey use to express heights in Britain.] See also: Image

For further details, and a wider view of this structure (from the south), see: Image

Full of moored boats that are used on Loch Lomond.

As the 1:25000 map shows, a triangle of woodland is bounded by the approach to Image on the south, and on the other two sides by the River Leven and the lade of one of the works that once stood by the river.

See also Image and Image The lade is depicted on the first-edition OS map (c.1860), and would, at that time, have served the Levenfield Works. These were later amalgamated with the Croftengea Works, which were just to the south of the Levenfield Works, to form the Alexandria Works: see Image