Hi Helen, you're welcome and more than welcome!
As you know, someone else kindly sent me the pic and a few more of the area; my contribution is to keep gently pestering and asking all and sundry for any photos or memories of that corner of the Shore Road, while yours is to piece all the scattered parts of the memory-and-evidence puzzle together, and yes, to keep this thread fresh and moving forwards.
I've asked the lady who owns the picture if she would allow us to share it on here; I'll keep you posted.
Thanks very much for the song, I'm really glad it made you smile! PS I'm totally stealing your line about the salt winds!
xx
Posted by: Dargan link=topic=39272.msg2197933#msg2197933 date=1584713082]
I want to thank Margaret for providing me with an image of the cottage to the side of Belleview Terrace (Lowwood side) bottom of Fortwilliam Park which I have been searching for, for more than 30 years. The directories, and only limited knowledge of that corner of the road (due to my age) led me wrong. For many years I believed it to be "Belleview Cottage" which photographs submitted to this thread by diligent researchers proved to be more of a "gingerbread" cottage in style. Meanwhile, the plain little homestead with the windowless gable still haunted me. I could see that it once had been behind Belleview Cottage as the latter sat flush with the road. Research with Jim a few years back led to the conclusion that the one I, and others such as Tommy, Walter, Agnes and Hughie, Roy (Seaviewite) and last but not least Margaret herself remembered, was the remaining one of the three "Mount Vernon" cottages. "Lewis' and "Creighton's" being the other two which had gone by the early 70s. They were never visible from the road according to my 90 year-old Mother who remembered Billy Creighton gathering vegetable peelings from people round the road for his pigs. These two houses were high on Ringan Point and obviously concealed by a shelter belt of trees or the coverage given by the trees of Lower Fortwilliam. What a pity no-one seems around from those times who could describe those cottages and life in and around them.
Images without people can't authenticate as well as those
with people, and so I struggled with the images submitted kindly and generously to the thread, of trams going by, aerial reconnaissance and even newspaper clippings. But I will say this: some of the images which showed the frontages of Belleview Terrace didn't seem to me to look right, and I know Tommy agreed at the time. One even presented with a window in the gable where the chimney tracked its way up (at the Fortwilliam end of Belleview Terrace). I don't know how that can be unless it was a smoke room, and it doesn't seem likely to me that such a thing would have been present in a large but basically run-of-the-mill terraced house. So it seems to me that we have to conclude that some of these images were doctored, unless someone can come up with why/how an external chimney can have a window in it. I'd be all ears, for knowledge is always welcome.
As to the rest of the inconsistencies I, and others, noticed: maybe by the time we were around the row had become soot-tarnished and somehow robbed of the architectural features which had become concealed by dirt, for look at what happened at Fortwilliam Arches themselves? The salt winds eroded the faces of the sentinels and smoothed the angles of the stone. Doesn't it give you a shiver of strange delight as you think of that? What a place!
Belleview Terrace itself was quite a forlorn row by the early 70s and it didn't last too long after that. I seem to remember too that it was as if the Shore Road itself entered their halls, such was the very close proximity to the pavement (that was no bad things as far as I'm concerned – truly "sacred" ground).
However, Margaret provided me lately with an image I could gaze at forevermore as it shows a girl standing at a higher level on Fortwilliam Park somewhere. The view is down onto the back of Bellevue Terrace, and there, nestling on the landscape is the third of the Mount Vernon Cottages! It looks every bit as mysterious as I remember. Everything about the image is right, and the reasons became available as to why, from the perspective of the Shore Road, only the gable wall of the cottage could be seen on the Lowwood side of Belleview Terrace. I walked by nearly every Saturday and always as a kid wanted to see more, but it was hard to fathom why the view was limited. It seemed to me at the time that the short lane took an odd twist, and the spread of vegetation loaned it more privacy.
Zooming in on things to take a closer look I saw again the high hedge of my memory which ran parallel with the road, plus a tree to one side of Belleview Terrace, and curiously a sight on the other side of the road which really blew me away as it was something I had not thought of since childhood:
There was a house on Fortwilliam Place on the opposite side of the road with slightly "dowdy" curtains and it emanated an earlier feel. There were no jazzy, 70s floral curtains like a drug-infested dream there, but that heavier, slightly "bedspread" material showing a pattern that revealed the hope of the 1950s post WW2. The colours were faded by the countless sunsets at Ringan Point's extremity at this lower level by our day, the hope of the 1950s obsolete. Well there it was in the picture. The house with the curtains I had entirely forgotten about! When I saw this it all came flooding back like a hammer blow. Photo's like this which restore the mind to an earlier time by small details long since lodged in its recesses are truly amazing. I expect now to have other memories return in small detail which are meaningless in one regard but strangely uplifting and encouraging on the flip side of that coin.
If all of this we are going through now in the world is the end of life as we know it, then I'll be heading off to hell with a pleasant feeling inside: that finally I got to see that old place again which captured my imagination way back when life was new to me, yet simultaneously older times and ways of life seemed to matter. Maybe they now have to return.
A big thank-you to Margaret M. whose own researches have been thorough, diligent and full of genuine sentiment. She's a stalwart. Here's one I know you'll like, Margaret (don't like the one you're getting, lol).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptFegqTOYYc Good luck to all. Long live the Shore Road.