New Lanark

His mission statement

It seemed an apposite time to make a visit to New Lanark, where former cotton mills powered by water from the River Clyde have been restored by a local Trust. It was a working community of 2500 people in the early nineteenth century when it was managed by Robert Owen, the son in law of David Dale who had built the community. Robert Owen created a more inclusive form of industrialisation based on the pursuit of individual happiness and collective endeavour. A local shop was provided by Robert Owen to sell good quality items at a cheaper price than shops in the nearby town of Lanark. It returned a profit that was returned to the community by way of building a nursery for infants who could walk and providing one of the first schools, which was free for all children until the age of ten. Owen also created an Institute for the Formation of Character, where music, dance, mathematics, geography and history were taught to adults, a prototype for a local college of education. This form of local shop was effectively owned by its customers and provided the template for the creation of the cooperative movement by the Rochdale pioneers.

Robert Owen was in the vanguard of social reformers and created a village that was one of the earliest examples of urban planning. This was recognised by the New Lanark Trust when it acquired and began the restoration of the site in the 1980's. The Royal Town Planning Institute was very much to the fore in bringing this to fruition and it benefited greatly from the European Union, which funded much of the work and subsequently enabled New Lanark to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The former Director of Planning of Lanark, Graham U'ren, set out the reasons for the siting of New Lanark in the 2018 Commemorative Lecture.

New Lanark impresses you first by its physical appearance, a fine assemblage of sandstone buildings nestling in a gorge at the foot of the falls of Clyde. The inventor of the water frame for spinning yarn, Richard Arkwright of Preston, described the site at New Lanark thus: "There is no place I have ever seen which affords better situations or more ample streams for cotton machinery.” It is estimated that the river Clyde provides the greatest volume of running water anywhere in Britain.

Its setting is within a magnificent wooded valley of native trees along the sandstone gorge. Unfortunately, the site has been somewhat blighted by an unsightly coniferous plantation above the west bank. As well as an industrial museum in one of the old mills, the other buildings have been put to good use for housing, a hotel, youth hostel, wildlife display, and separate museums in the former school, shop and Robert Owen's house. Then there are the inevitable tourism shops, cafes and the usual not very relevant clutter of promotion banners from the tourist board. On the day it was virtually devoid of visitors and we spent over 3 hours absorbing the chance to enjoy the inheritance traits of a social reformer.

It was the day that Chancellor Philip Hammond set his budget. He acknowledged the gross unfairness of many aspects of global capitalism as did the free press mainly because they had some celebrity entrepreneurs like Philip Green to blame. It occurred to us that David Dale and Robert Owen seemed more relevant than ever.  Hammond finally found the nerve to introduce some extra tax on global digital companies and to claim the end of austerity (its fake news folk), but there was no attempt to regulate the short-term vandalism by hedge funds and the financial markets that have destroyed much of British industry and the retail sector in recent years; Evans bikes being the latest casualty sold by a hedge fund to Mike Ashley who is to close half the stores. The Chancellor would have done better by firing up a DeLorean to go forward to the past and adopt some of Robert Owen's ideas, he was a man well ahead of his time.

Looking down to New Lanark

Spinning wool 

New buildings, the mill workers houses

Robert Owen's house

Houses and the nursery

Who needs bitcoins?

Housing Association houses

The counting house and Caithness Row

The water lade next to the Institute for the Formation of Character

Workers cottages

The Clyde barrage to divert water

Tinto Hill

Start of walk from Fallburn

Summit Cairn

The path from Fallburn to the north

Looking north to Lanarkshire

Looking west from the summit to the trig point

Scaut Hill from summit

South-east and the River Clyde

Monday,  29 October 2018

Tinto           711m      51mins 

Acent:        522 metres
Distance:    7 kilometres
Time:          1 hour 31 minutes

The first frost of winter also brought a cold but clear day. I have looked at Tinto Hill on dozens of occasions when passing but never attempted to climb it as I have usually been on a long journey to and from England with limited time. However, it is less than an hour away from Glasgow so we travelled down after the morning peak hour traffic. The Clyde Valley was resplendent with the fields still shimmering in the morning frost. We passed through Lanark, always a solid looking town, and the main street looked as if it had coped better than most small towns with the majority of shops still in business. It is only 7 miles further to the start of the path up Tinto from the A72 at Fallburn, where the excellent Tinto Hill Tearoom provides good homemade fare.

There were already a dozen cars in the car park and a few couples were on the lower slopes, usually accompanied by several dogs. The path was wide and set at an easy gradient on the lower slopes, it continued for almost a kilometre before veering to the right and becoming progressively steeper. By this time I had fallen into an easy rhythm and I used the walkers ahead as targets to maintain a good pace. There is then a narrower level path that skirts the side of a hill before climbing more steeply as the main path is rejoined. The visibility was good and the ground hard from the overnight frost. Nearer the summit, the path became stonier and it ramped up again but at no point does it require halts for a breather.

There is a viewing indicator mounted on the mortared cairn at the summit, the old trig point sits slightly below a fence to the west. I took a few photos before some other groups arrived and seated themselves at the cairn. Tinto is a very different hill than my usual staple in the highlands. The ground was dry, the grass short, the hills rounded, the valleys broad, the walkers less well equipped and the expedition a whole lot shorter. There were half a dozen couples on the hill who knew how to pace a walk, a young couple on a day off after working a weekend shift were shattered from the climb and a few gnarled hikers were reliving past memories. I am probably in the latter group and reflected that I had always intended to enter the annual hill race but never found the fortitude to make the 120-mile round trip for a race that would take well under an hour in those days. Well, that's my story!

Tinto is a fine viewpoint and on a really clear day would offer views to Glasgow, the Trossachs, the Border hills, England and the Ayrshire coast. Today, the views were good rather than excellent, with clouds in the east and a haze to the south, west and north. I began the descent and apart from the few icy sections of hard ground, it was an easy canter down the hill. I was back well ahead of the 2 hours that I had assumed and had to walk down the road to the tearoom to find Aileen who was reading a book and enjoying the quiet Monday morning ambience of the place. I ordered some soup at noon before we set off for New Lanark and the afternoon activity studying the roots of community munificence.

Langside

Langside Monument

I visited our old neighbourhood on the south side of Glasgow yesterday, taking advantage of a perfect late autumn day and catching a bus to the Battlefield Rest. It was a run-down public transport waiting room when we lived there but now hosts a cafe. We spent over seven years living in Langside/Battlefield during the early years of family life in the 1980s. We bought a blonde sandstone Edwardian semi on Millbrae Road across from the Mansionhouse Road Hospital that has now been demolished and replaced by flats. 

The house was built on a sloping site and had 3 floors and a large unruly garden. We moved in with a two-month-old baby and a large mortgage after rewiring and installing central heating. Over the next four years, two more children arrived, all the rooms were decorated, the garden was tamed and a parking place was created. The house had many attractive period features including decorative cornices, dado rails, marble fireplaces, high ceilings and pitch pine doors. It had seen little modernisation before we bought it although the downstairs drawing room had been subjected to decorator's cancer - Artex. 

Even in the seven years that we were there the traffic on Millbrae Road increased dramatically with the noise and fumes that this entails. Following a burglary whilst we were on holiday, we felt less secure and decided to move out of the city. It was a wrench to leave the house we had invested so much time and money in to create a comfortable home. We made many new friends with other families in the area. The friendships had been cemented by the children and all the mutual support that emerges through playgroups, babysitting, children's parties and outings to parks and the seaside.

Battlefield Nursery and Primary School had been a good place for the two girls to start their education with children from many ethnic groups. The local library was used regularly, the Victoria Infirmary A&E was only 3 minutes away and the children did have accidents. We had a local butcher, greengrocer and Italian ice cream shop and it was only 15 minutes to Pollock Grounds. This became the venue for outings with our visitors particularly after the Burrell Collection opened.

My journey to work was a relatively easy 30 minutes by either bus, train, car or by running. Queen's Park was 2 minutes away and provided an exact 2 mile run around the perimeter that became a staple part of my training when I started to run again in 1982. I went out most evenings after 9:00pm and managed to get my PB down to 10:15. I ran to and from work about twice a week, the direct route for the morning run was just 4 miles. The run home was either a 7-mile route via Pollok Grounds or 10 miles via Bellahouston Park and Pollock Grounds.

I was reluctant to move to the suburbs and Aileen wished to live in a more rural environment so we leapfrogged to the Trossachs. It was to be nearer grandparents, to have access to the trails and hills, to avoid the noise and fumes of traffic and to find a safer environment after the break-in. I had spent the first 40 years of my life in cities so it was quite a shock. We moved on a late November day and spent several days unpacking boxes and discovering the cold reality of an old stone house in winter. The children were welcomed to the new primary school and I quickly began to appreciate the 200 miles of trails in the forest that became my playground and gymnasium for the next 30 years. The only downside was the daily 26-mile and 50-minute commute to Glasgow but after 3 years that was superseded by the far easier trip to Stirling, just 25 minutes on quiet roads with breathtaking views.

Battlefield Rest

Victoria Infirmary balconies on the Nightingale wards

Langside Hill Church or restaurant now 

Home for 7 years

The rear of house on the left

Battlefield Primary

Battlefield Primary

Pollok Park and Harry Benson

Pollok House from White Cart Water

When we lived in Glasgow in the 1980s, Pollok Grounds was our local park. It was a good mile away from home but provided everything a local park should do and more. It is the largest park in Glasgow with 480 hectares. The estate had belonged to the Maxwell family from the 13th century and its last occupant was the 10th baronet, Sir John Stirling Maxwell, an MP and founder of the National Trust and Forestry Commission. He was by all accounts a benevolent patrician who cared and provided education for the staff who worked on the estate. He planted hundreds of specimen trees in the estate and gardens. The house and estate were gifted to Glasgow Corporation in 1967 with the provision for the Burrell Collection to be housed in the park.

Pollok Grounds were designated a Country Park in 1980 before the construction of the Burrell Museum in 1983. Pollok Grounds have become the host over the years to the police sports ground at Lochinch, police dog and horse training unit, golf course, cricket club, lacrosse club and rugby club. It is laced with cycle trails, footpaths, and a herd of highland cattle are a popular attraction for children.

It had been our intention to revisit our old haunts during our summer sojourn in Glasgow but I had managed only one run in the grounds during the summer. It had been the highlight on most of my regular training routes in the 1980s. Twice a week on a 7-mile run home from work, once with my running club and at the weekend for my Sunday morning run if I was not racing. Our children learned to ride their bikes there, and any weekend visitors were taken there as a means of letting young children tire themselves whilst adults enjoyed the walks and the newly opened Burrell Museum. The building was a spacious modern design that blended harmoniously into the mature woodlands that Maxwell had planted.

We had only occasionally visited Pollock House and today that was the objective, partly to see the gardens and partly to see the Harry Benson photographic exhibition. We were not disappointed, the gardens were looked after by the Council and although it was the fag end of the year, the displays were still impressive. The house is now managed by the National Trust and needs some investment but the photographic exhibition was quite outstanding.

Harry Benson had been a newspaper photographer in Glasgow before being dispatched to photograph the Beatles during their epic trip to the United States in 1964. He stayed on in the United States where he managed to capture all the Presidents from Jack Kennedy to Bill Clinton and artists from Dolly Parton to James Brown. These were exhibited along with shots from Glasgow in the 1960s that captured the children playing in the tenements and people going about their business. It was a sublime collection of photographs that captured the emotions and raw humanity of its subjects.

View from the house

The vegetable garden

Harry Benson's take on Glasgow children in the 1960's

Paul and Stella McCartney

The Clintons

Dolly Parton

Million dollar man, lock him up!

Beinn Dubh, Glen Luss

Beinn Dubh from Coire na h-Eanachan

Monday, 13 October 2018

Ascent:      730 metres   

Distance:   11 kilometres

Time:         3 hours 11 minutes

Beinn Dubh        650m    1hr   12mins

Mid Hill             657m    1hr   40mins  

Amidst the grey days of October, there was a rare day of blue skies. By late morning I decided to take advantage and drove to Luss to climb the Graham, Beinn Dubh, that overlooks Loch Lomond and its islands. The drive from Glasgow is just 45 minutes, and much to my surprise, I found a parking spot at the foot of Glen Luss despite a fair number of mothers and young children having parked to explore the Halloween Scary Faerie Trail that had been set up nearby. The high winds of recent days had calmed but after an overnight frost, there was still a nip in the air as I started the walk just before 1pm. There is a broad grassy path that climbs to Rhu Wood and then follows the ridgeline to the summit, it is pretty unrelenting.

The rains of the last few days meant that the path was muddy and boggy in places. There were another five or six parties ahead. By the time I reached the summit, I had counted 10 women and 5 men on the climb. Two of them were national park rangers in green uniforms, not something you ever see in Glasgow. It was warm work with the sun beating down on the cognac coloured bracken. I had to remove my jacket for the climb and there was a constant temptation to admire the view behind. After a few weeks without any hard physical activity, I decided to push myself with the objective of catching all the groups ahead. I managed it just before the summit where I spent 15 minutes. I was joined by an older couple from Helensburgh who were keen walkers. This was their regular local hill but they felt it had seemed harder than usual today. They had walked in most parts of Scotland but were concerned about how the traffic in the far north of Scotland had vastly increased in recent years and made it more difficult to get parking for the hills.

I had decided that I would complete the circuit of Coire na h-Eanachan and Mid Hill so bade them farewell rather than haranguing them with my rant about the North Coast 500. As always the fine ridge walk between the tops was the best part of the walk. The hills to the north were mainly in the cloud but the nearby Grahams were all visible reminding me that I must climb them sometime soon. The descent from Mid Hill to Glen Luss is steep but quick, there is an obvious grassy passage to the road before the final 3 kilometres back to the car. The glen was resplendent in its autumn colours with the native oaks and birches unmolested by conifers. I was back at the car by 4pm where I met an elderly hill runner from Cove, he had run up and down Bein Dubh. We had a friendly chat about keeping fit with the advancement of age.

Loch Lomond Islands from Rhu Wood

Ben Lomond across Loch Lomond

Loch Lomond from the Beinn Dubh ridge

Ben Lomond from Beinn Dubh

Beinn Dubh from Mid Hill

Glen Striddle

Oak in Glen Luss

Glasgow Abodes

Athole Gardens

Living in Glasgow for the past few months whilst a new house is being built has given me the chance to visit parts of Glasgow where I lived and worked for 18 years. These included various flats when I moved to Glasgow in my mid-twenties and then the family home where we lived when the children were born and where they started school.

I arrived in Glasgow to start a new job after leaving my job in Oxford the previous afternoon. I had driven up the M6 in the evening to Preston with all my worldly possessions in my 1956 split windscreen Morris Minor. After dumping the stuff I did not immediately need at my parent's house, I travelled up to Glasgow the next morning. It was a Friday and in those days a four and a half hour journey before the M74 from Carlisle to Glasgow had been built.

I drove into Glasgow along Edinburgh Road, a dual-carriageway. I had been overtaken by dozens of cars and assumed the speed limit was 40mph. I was stopped after overtaking a police car that had just turned onto the road at traffic lights. I was doing 42mph and I felt that I had been discriminated against for passing a police car. Welcome to Glasgow they said as I explained that I was just moving to a new job in Glasgow. I decided to appeal and appeared in court a couple of months later. The judge, who also owned a Morris Minor, was sympathetic to my story and dismissed the fine.

I arrived in the city centre at 1:30 p.m. and parked just off Buchanan Street next to my new office in Gordon Street. I met some of my new work colleagues and asked what was the best way to find a flat to rent. I was directed to a newsagent's shop on Byres Road. By 3pm I was taking telephone numbers from the cards in the window and eventually made contact with someone who was renting a bedsit in Athole Gardens. He agreed to meet me there at 5pm and I had moved in by 6pm. I sorted out my few possessions and found the Curler's bar by 8 p.m. After a couple of pints in the crowded young people's bar and before last orders at 9:50pm I went in search of some food and found the Ubiquitous Chip down Ruthven Lane. I thought it was a chippy but no such luck, it was a small restaurant that had yet to become one of the most celebrated in Glasgow. It seemed a bit pricey so I carried on my search for some food. Without any knowledge, I headed towards the city centre and happened upon the Shish Mahal on Gibson Street, undoubtedly the best Indian restaurant at the time. I was surrounded by people with carry-outs for parties but resisted the invitations and made it back to the flat by midnight. Things had moved fast since arriving in Glasgow.

Athole Gardens was a perfect location, handy for the underground to Buchanan Street, lots of eating places and pubs but the bedsit was a large cold north-facing room. It was cheaper to go out every night than to find cash for the electric fire. After two months I was ready to move on and I spotted an advert in the same shop for a fourth person to share a top-floor flat in a splendid stone villa at the end of Kirklees Terrace. I phoned and spoke to the person who was moving out. He showed me around the flat and the large master bedroom facing south that would become my room. The room was larger than the average new house being built in the 1970s and adorned with fine timber, plaster cornices and decorative features that gave it an elegance that I had never previously witnessed.

What was the catch? Well, I was told it was the other flatmates. An IBM management trainee from Gourock who was a keen yachtsman, an educational psychologist and an insurance salesman who was a notorious Glasgow playboy with a Marcos car, fleet of girlfriends and a serious gambling habit. This included late-night sessions in the flat and Fred, the person moving out, had built up heavy debts to the others. I took the risk and after winning a few hands of whist explained that I would not be playing cards for money. I greatly enjoyed the flat for the next six months until we were told by the owners that the whole house had been sold and we would have to move. I had avoided gambling but had to intervene on several occasions to console the one-night stands of the playboy and then to deck one of the other housemates after he hit his girlfriend, a Scottish Ballet ballerina when he had had too much to drink. He never returned to the flat, his girlfriend wisely left him and moved to London. I declined the offer to share another flat with the other two.

As it happened one of my work colleagues had recently become a father and was living in a large ground-floor flat in Victoria Circus. His wife had decided to return to her parents in England with their young baby as he was working long hours to complete his contract. He had a spare room and it was an ideal arrangement for both of us. He was a keen rally driver and I became his navigator in his souped-up mini-cooper. We both worked late and went rallying or to football matches at the weekends. We even made a drive down to Liverpool from work late one afternoon to watch a European game and then drove back to Glasgow overnight arriving at the office at 7:00 a.m. His wife came up every few weekends and I was able to babysit to give them some time together. A couple of months later he finished his contract and I had to search for another flat.

This time it was a tenement flat in Clouston Street with some civil engineers who had been at university together and a lawyer friend of one of them. It was a typical Glasgow flat of young professionals. We ate badly and played squash together and there was a trickle of girlfriends. After a couple of months, the lawyer moved out and was replaced by another civil engineer friend. Ian had been travelling abroad and we established an immediate rapport, he became a lifelong friend. We both were keen skiers and had a similar attitude to seeking adventures and living for the moment.  I stayed in the flat for about eight months before moving on again.

The next house was a run-down farm on the outskirts of Coatbridge. An acquaintance of my father had bought it as a commercial investment and asked if I would like to live there at no cost to prevent the farmhouse and related buildings from getting vandalised. It had five bedrooms and two large barns as well as a courtyard and a garage. I persuaded friends Ian and Donald together with Rona, a nurse who was Donald's flatmate, to join me in the house. The rent-free living was the initial attraction but it became a fun place to live and the four of us stayed there for two years. We bought a job lot of furniture at an auction, including a piano for £2, a three-piece suite and some beds. I cobbled together some shelves, cupboards and a coffee table with stuff from a nearby tip and we were ready to roll. We created a games room to play darts and ran the farm as an open house for friends and people passing through.

At various times we had a Doctor friend of Ian's, some Chilean refugees including a real Princess whom I had met at a party, a couple of unemployed friends and numerous others staying for a few days or weeks. We held a party/dance every couple of months for a diverse bunch of friends and acquaintances. One of our friends was a lawyer and a wannabe DJ provided the music for a hundred or so people who turned up. The highlight of the sessions was Life is a Minestrone which had everyone abandoning the straw bales that we had lined the barn with. We held collections for the local children's home and some of the care staff used to come along. The house had our fair share of break-ins with the local youth taking tape recorders and record players but we chased and caught them one day and things improved thereafter.

After two years we were given notice to quit and it probably suited us all. Ian had got a job in Aberdeen, Donald was to get married and Rona moved in with her boyfriend, Bernie, who ran a pub and an aerial erection company and had a yacht on the Clyde that I crewed on for two seasons. After we left, I bought a flat in Kirkintilloch but spent a lot of my time in Glasgow in Aileen's flat in Great George Street. After we got married and started a family we moved to our first family home in Langside, Glasgow.

Kirklee Terrace, my room at the top

Victoria Circus

Clouston Street

Great George Street

Millbrae, the family home

Great Scottish Run 2018

70 minutes and just behind Dibaba

The Great Scottish Run in Glasgow has been going since the 1980's, first as a marathon, then a 25k race in 1989 and 1990 and since as a half marathon. I have run it in all its guises but not for over twenty years. Today it was Gregor's turn and he managed an impressive 70:34, finishing 22nd male out of over 10,000 starters and just behind Mare Dibaba, the women's world marathon champion of 2015. He also finished just ahead of Jack, his main challenger to be club champion, it has been nip and tuck between them all season and they were stride for stride for the whole race.

We took the opportunity to follow the race on St. Vincent Street, and then to watch the runners ascend the ramp to the Kingston Bridge. Whilst the race went on a 10-mile loop round Pollockshields, Pollok and Bellahouston parks and back through Govan, we dawdled along the Clyde waterfront to the finish in Glasgow Green. It was a stroll down memory lane. Past my old offices, now demolished, underneath the Kingston Bridge, which had been my route to work for seven years and along the Broomielaw where I had organised a Strathclyde one-mile street race with colleagues from the Police. Our daughter had worked in one of the impressive new office buildings that now provide the backcloth to the Broomielaw. Then to Glasgow Green for the finish and a chance to watch the glorious feeling of achievement by the runners as they crossed the finish line.

Gregor's time was four minutes better than my pb for the half marathon and I felt proud of him, his training had paid off. The camaraderie of his running club was infectious as they gathered at the finish but the patter was just as brutal as it used to be thirty years ago.

Leaders crossing the Motorway on St Vincent Street

A good use of the Kingston Bridge for once

Barbaric Engineering

Commonwealth Games Mural under Kingston Bridge

Broomielaw skyline

Kingston Bridge

Big Yin behind St Enoch's Square

Central Station rail bridge

Pedestrian Bridge to Carlton Place

Jack and Gregor neck and neck