Opened in 1921, Firs Park was the home of East Stirlingshire Football club for 87 years. It was closed in 2008 and has sat like this, since. If this photograph had been taken during a match, you'd be looking out onto the pitch from the main stand.
This post follows a similar tone to the previous entry about the bowling club. They were in fact taken on the same day. So that's why the lighting/weather is the same and why the spirit of the photographs is also the same. It's another part of the town that has been left to rot for years. It's right in the centre of the town, as well. In the photograph above, the outline of buildings in the distance are the backs of shops in the busy retail park.
I visited Firs park exactly twice in my life before this one. The first was while at high school. Our school football team had reached the final of a local tournament and were playing there. We lost.
The second was when bored one day during my late teens. It was free to get in if you didn't mind standing (which is how all games were in the past) so we wandered along to watch some low level football. I don't remember the opposition or the result. My lasting memory was that there was grass growing through the crumbling concrete. It looked a little abandoned back then, too.
There isn't a lot of money in Scottish football. Celtic are a rich and successful club but even their rivals Rangers now wallow in debt that prevents them from competing again. Most, if not all football clubs in the country struggle to make ends meet.
East Stirlingshire, more commonly known as 'The Shire' were almost always at the bottom end of the lowest league table. They've since managed to be relegated from that to some league that no longer gets a mention on the radio when they read out the scores on a Saturday.
Some fella wrote a book about their (lack of) fortunes a few years back. I haven't read it, and at 7 quid for a digital version, it's unlikely that I will, to be honest. But don't let that put you off.
The entrance sits at the end of a residential street. It's here that you find the majority of what's left. Doors that were far too thin for your average Scottish football fan and turnstiles are still the easiest way in.
It was while wandering about here that I had a little run in with a scary dog. I'm quite good with dogs but when they're big and aggressive, not so much. I had had a close thing with some guard dogs only just a few months before this (more about that in another blog) so I was a bit apprehensive when some huge beast came out of a house and started sniffing about the entrance that I had walked through a few minutes earlier. The dog started growling but couldn't see me. I was round a corner, looking for a stick or a rock to try frighten it away if need be. The owner kept calling the dog but didn't know I was there so wasn't too fussed about keeping it under control. Eventually, the guy managed to get the dog into the car and they drove off. I was free to explore, again.
Once away from the entrance, the stadium is harder to find. While the toilet block is there in its entirety, albeit derelict, the main stand is long gone and only foundations remain, really. The odd artefact has survived here and there, too.
This is half an advert for the pub I used to work in.
Something that I found interesting was that some local had been using the walls as a canvas for their graffiti. It was like a peek into an artists studio to see all the unfinished and rejected work.
UPDATE: The remains of the buildings seen in these photographs have since been demolished.
