Clatteringshaws DamGLENLEE POWER STATION
“A credit to Scottish engineering”
GLENLEE DERIVES its waterpower, not from the River Ken, but from the man-made Clatteringshaws Loch. Constructing a dam across The Blackwater of Dee and flooding adjacent marshland formed this loch. The water is then fed to the Glenlee turbines by 3.5 miles of tunnel and pipeline, built at a cost of £250,000 and several lives.
Glenlee pipeline and power station“In simple terms, the tunnel was built by driving through the rock from both ends, Glenlee and Clatteringshaws,” said Charles Donald, the Team Manager at the Galloway Hydros. “There were other starting points, but, when the two ends were linked up in October 1933, the difference between them was only a quarter of an inch.”
“The entire project is a credit to Scottish civil engineering, but the Glenlee Tunnel is the outstanding aspect. We still have people coming here from abroad, professionals from the engineering industry, who come to learn from what was achieved in the construction and continuing operation of the Galloway Hydros.”
“Given the time when this entire project was undertaken, the early 1930s, and the equipment that was available to engineers, it really is a magnificent achievement, that the tunnel was hewn by hand from the rock,” he added.
The head of a power station is the distance that water falls through it to drive the turbines. All the power stations in the Galloway Hydros have low heads, except Glenlee, which has a nett head of 370 feet.
Glenlee is the only high head, high-speed station in the Galloway Scheme, operating under a nett head of 370 ft. The outfall joins The Ken just below St Johns Town of Dalry, and these combined waters then flow on into Loch Ken.
Fraser Patterson
21 March 1998