Clackmannanshire Council’s account of Alloa docks' closure has been challenged by residents who were present at the time.
On Thursday, November 13, more than 40 people, including Provost Donald Balsillie, gathered at the Speirs Centre to share memories of the dock’s final days as a port and to ensure its history is recorded accurately.
During the meeting, residents contested information on the Clackmannanshire Scot website, which states the port closed in 1970, while other accounts suggest activity had ceased by the mid-1950s.
Residents said the last ship to utilise the enclosed Wet Dock arrived a decade earlier, insisting that the merchant vessel Stefan, delivering equipment for Alloa’s Ind Coope brewery, unloaded there in 1960.
Following its departure, remaining dock employees were made redundant and the gates to the dock were left open, resulting in mud accumulation.
Demolition materials from the Earl of Mar’s Alloa House and from Youngers Brewery at Candleriggs were among the first to be tipped into the dock in the following years.
A Danish company, Christiani and Nielsen, opened a steel fabrication plant on part of the site in the early 1970s, by which time the infilling had settled sufficiently to allow for building works.
The meeting also heard that nearby Alloa’s dry dock, dating back to 1790, ceased operations around the same time as the Wet Dock.
Part of the McLeods’ shipyard at the time, the dry dock was still used in the 1950s for repairs or scrapping.
Residents recalled that in the winter of 1959/60, a high spring tide burst its gates open, leaving the dock to fill with mud. It was not used again before the shipyard closed in 1971.
Chris Davies, the meeting organiser, whose great-grandfather Alexander McLeod ran the Alloa Ferry from the 1880s, thanked those who contributed their memories and Susan Yule of the Clackmannanshire Records Office at the Speirs Centre for making the event possible.
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