Last month, whilst in the ‘orchard country’ of Lanarkshire, I visited the abandoned Braidwood telescope near St Oswald’s Chapel Farm. All lenses and mirrors are gone from this old telescope and every movement corroded solid.
The telescope was owned by David Hunter of St Ronans, Brierybank Avenue, Lanark, who himself supplied telescopes to William Peck of the Calton Hill Observatory, Edinburgh, and a telescope for Stirling High School Observatory.
David Hunter was a pioneer of electrical engineering and became interested in astronomy, becoming a member of The Royal Astronomical Society in 1899. He was elected Fellow of The Royal Astronomical Society in 1902. He died, aged 57, in December 1910.
The Glasgow Herald, 7 August 1890, Lanark Industrial Exhibition:
The telescope and observatory remained at St Ronans into the 1960s when the telescope was given away by the family and it subsequently ended up at this site.
William Alexander Hunter, son of David Hunter, joined the Royal Flying Corps at the age of 19 and trained as a pilot. Sadly during the final stages of his training his aircraft came down in the sea off Gullane, Ayrshire, and he was drowned:
Edinburgh Evening News, 4 July 1918:
Carluke and Lanark Gazette, 13 July 1918:
Ali Smith ‘Winter’:
Tomas Tranströmer, ‘Seeing in the Dark’: 
Iain Banks, ‘Poems‘:
A. S Byatt, ‘Possession’:
Clive James, ‘Event Horizon‘, in Sentenced to Life.
Commonplace book, Dr Peter Scott-Gordon:
Fascinating 🙂 stumbled across the telescope on Google maps. The Stirling telescope is still used.
I must visit the Stirling telescope! I live close by!