About — Lost Dunoon

This site exists to make change visible. Dunoon contains sites that have vanished completely, sites that survive only as names or ground-shapes, and sites that still stand but are no longer understood for what they once were. Lost Dunoon tries to gather those strands in one readable place.

What the project covers

Lost landmarksCastles, shoreline structures, public buildings, resort infrastructure, and erased settlement traces.

InfrastructureReservoirs, waterworks, military traces, transport links, and hidden systems that shaped the town.

Town formOlder streets, open ground, renamed places, and the way Dunoon expanded and re-ordered itself.

Ways of lifeTourism, bathing, steamer culture, American years, and everyday habits that have thinned out or disappeared.

How the site works

Each page is meant to do four jobs:

state clearly what the place or feature was
identify what has been lost
say what remains now, if anything
point the reader toward map evidence, source material, and local memory

The strongest entries are not built from one source alone. They are built by combining page content, old maps, museum interpretation, and what local people remember.

Core tools behind the site

Map comparison

Grid Ghosts

The historical map room. Use it to compare older OS sheets with the modern town and see where form, routes, and land use changed.

Open Grid Ghosts

Research tools

Research Desk

The bookmarked working tools behind the project: Argyll and Bute ArcGIS, NLS historic maps, and ScotLIS.

Open Research Desk

Sources and standards

Lost Dunoon is source-led, but it is not pretending to be a finished academic archive. The working standard is:

Primary where possible: historical maps, title and place evidence, official material, and direct site reading.
Secondary where useful: museum interpretation, local-history publications, trusted local-history websites, and archival summaries.
Local memory where needed: especially where photographs are scarce, the site has been overwritten, or naming has shifted over time.

Where evidence is uncertain, the page should say so plainly.

What the project is not

not a complete history of Dunoon
not a scrapbook of unverified nostalgia
not a legal or title authority
not only about demolition — also about loss of meaning, role, access, or visibility

How to contribute

The site improves fastest when local people add specific, usable material:

old photographs
postcards
family recollections with approximate dates
corrections to place names, uses, or timelines
notes on what is still visible on the ground

Best contributions are precise. “My gran called this…” is useful. “This used to be different” is not enough on its own.

Open Share a memory