WAY A tragic end to waggoner’s life
WE REVISIT DEREK PARKER’S RAMBLES THROUGH RENFREWSHIRE
Mine of information
“Don’t you go near that Bleachie Pond. It’s deep and dangerous. A man and his horse drowned there and were never seen again.”
That was the grim warning parents of my generation uttered in desperate attempts to scare us from playing at one of many derelict flooded mineshafts near our homes 50 years ago.
But their strictures merely aroused our curiosity and emboldened us – disobedient little rascals that we were – to sneak surreptitiously along the lime tree-lined avenue between Elderslie and Foxbar to go ghosthunting in the Bleachie Park, opposite the superintendent’s lodge at the Abbey Cemetery, with its solemn sepulchres and forbidding firs adding to the excitement of our fearsome forays.
After scrambling through long grass – frighteningly festooned with sharp thistles, tangled briars, jaggy hawthorn trees and stinging nettles – we stood at the edge of a thicket- thronged embankment and peered into the gloomy waters of the perilous pond 15 feet below.
Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets – the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you.
The flooded shaft – a relic of the 19th century coal-mining era – was once an air vent at Auchenlodment colliery.
According to local folklore, it was the gloomy spot where a weary waggoner at nearby Auchenlodment Farm was drowned one dark night, along with his horse, when the hay-loaded cart they steered, toppled over the edge of the perpendicular precipice and plunged into the murky waters of the Bleachie Pond, never to be seen again.
Peering into the putrid pool, we imagined we saw the phantom forms of the drowned carter and horse, floating in their death throes beneath the flotsam-filled surface – and staring at us agonisingly from the dark depths of the tree-canopied pond.
And, on sombre winter afternoons, grey wisps of mist spiralling terrifyingly from the pool swarmed spookily like the gaunt spectres of the doomed carter and his steed plodding across the nightblackened Bleachie Park on their journey to eternity.
Today, the Bleachie Park lies buried beneath a private housing development.
Yet ghostly voices echo eerily down through the ages. Blood-curdling shrieks mingle in the melancholy moonlight with mournful moans from the cemetery.
Are they just the weird wails of marauding owls and the wind soughing through branches in the trees?
Or do the spine-tingling screams of a drowning carter and the creepy creak of his wooden wagon-wheels seep from the dark depths of the underground mineshaft where his bleached bones still lie?