MY walk begins as good walks should end, with a pub. Here in Cathcart, in the south side of Glasgow, the Old Smiddy is believed to be one of the oldest buildings.
But for much of the 20th century, it was impossible to buy alcohol here as Cathcart, once an ancient village and later a genteel suburb, was a stronghold of the Temperance Movement.
Advocates of prohibition prevailed, in 1920, in a local vote to make the area “dry”, in the process closing every pub and licensed grocer.
By the 1970s, times had changed. The thirsty were making their way across the boundary to Rutherglen, and the ban was being challenged.
In 1974, the owner of the then Old Smiddy Coffee House applied for and was granted a table licence, in the face of “strong opposition” mainly from older residents. In the years that followed, the local press routinely reported on the battle for booze.
By the early 1980s, enterprising shopkeepers and publicans were inundating the local authority with licence applications, much to the displeasure of local worthies.
Going down the street, past neat suburban houses and manicured lawns, and an entrance to Linn Park closed by a rockfall where a poem of polite protest has been tied to a battered-looking wire fence, brings me to Snuff Mill Bridge.
It dates from the early 18th century and likely incorporates parts of an earlier structure. Now reserved for walkers and cyclists, it once carried the main road between Glasgow and Ayr above the waters of the White Cart River.
The bridge and surrounding buildings have long been considered one of the most “picturesque” parts in Glasgow. Despite this, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the area was once home to various industries powered by the waters of the river, chiefly mills – for grain, for snuff during the height of the tobacco trade, and in what is now Linn Park, the Milholm Paper Mill.
A grand building rises next to the bridge, the Lindsay Tenement, built in the 1860s by the owner of the snuff mill.
Cathcart means “fortress on the River Cart”. The word “castle” might, in the minds of the excitable, conjure up images of the chateaus of the Loire Valley. Cathcart Castle, however, seems to have been a relatively simple tower of a kind familiar in Scotland, surrounded by a defensive enclosure and located above a steep cliff.
But its most striking feature is one of absence – Cathcart Castle no longer truly exists. The castle became uninhabited in the 18th century and was then used as a source of building stone.
Following a collapse in 1980, Glasgow City Council decided it had become unsafe and demolished it almost to ground level. This, it seems, is how to lose an ancient building within living memory.
Across the road from the castle site is the Court Knowe, a perhaps revealingly named hill which might have been the site of an earlier fortification. The Court Knowe is traditionally, but likely not accurately, associated with Queen Mary and the Battle of Langside.
Down into Linn Park, the walker passes the site of another vanished building, Cathcart, or Cartside, House, which was an 18th-century mansion. On a relatively small site on a hillside, now home to a children’s playpark, it feels difficult to imagine how this house fitted into the landscape.
Probably all that remains of it above ground are sections of boundary wall alongside the road.
Both buildings were associated, and sometimes owned, by the aristocratic Cathcart family – lords, and later earls of Cathcart – although at other times they belonged to the Semples and Maxwells.
The earls long ago left the area – and, more recently, the House of Lords. Faring little better than the castle, the house was bought by the Glasgow Corporation in the 1920s and similarly demolished.
In the late 18th century, a local clergyman wrote that: “The banks of the Cart have long been resorted to by the botanical student. Such is the warmth and shelter that in some sequestered spots, an almost perpetual verdure is to be found.”
While perhaps not “perpetual”, the area certainly remains leafy. Stomping along rising ground, past an area of the park which in the 1990s gave way in a landslide, I take a track less travelled, up through oak, hawthorn, bracken and long grasses, emerging behind a squat, flat-roofed building.
Now closed and shuttered, Linn Park golf clubhouse was never going to win any architectural awards.
There’s a sense, too, of moving from a well-documented and storied geography into one rather more obscure, and, by dint of some of its previous owners, darker. The central area of the park, including the disused golf course, comprised the lands of Hagtounhill.
This was once an estate and farm which belonged to the Maxwells of Pollok and has a long history linked to mining.
Coal, the Statistical Account noted, was found across the Parish of Cathcart. In a legal document from 1664, Sir George Maxwell agreed to supply “threttie loads of smith coals” from his tenants at “Hagtoun-hill heugh”.
Today the golf course is, to all intents and purposes, a meadow, climbing upwards towards the Top Wood. Here, in the vicinity of a trig point, were the farm buildings, which survived to be marked on a plan in the early 20th century.
There is a suggestion, too, that this had been the site of a manor house.
An overview of the history of the park’s lands by Dr Stuart Nisbet notes that Hagtounhill included coal and limestone quarries and a mill. At this point, the history of the estate becomes entwined with slavery. It was purchased, in 1766, by a leading mercantile family, the MacDowalls of Castle Semple.
Their wealth came, as Nisbet explains, from personal ownership of sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
During his ownership of Hagtounhill, William McDowall – who was MP for Glasgow and Renfrewshire – also owned plantations in Saint Kitts and Grenada.
In 1791, first mention is made of Linn House, “commodious on the banks of the Cart”, and presumably the centre of the country estate moved to Linn House.
In the early 19th century, the estate was bought by Colin Campbell, who, like the McDowalls owned sugar plantations and enslaved people in the Caribbean.
Nisbet highlights that the development of what was now known as the Linn or Lynn estate – a name taken from the waterfall below the 1790s mansion – coincided with the abolition of slavery in 1833, which provided the Campbells with a “huge windfall”.
The industrial and agricultural aspects of the estate were deliberately concealed by plantations of trees, transforming it into the rolling parkland and woods seen today, which would have also helped the owners make Linn House a more attractive prospect.
In the 1920s, it was opened to the public when it became Linn Park, one of Glasgow’s largest and surely most interesting parks.
Sitting on the grass by the trig point, looking down over the city below, and onwards to the fells and mountains, I pondered a walk on a summer afternoon which had taken me from temperance to slavery, and the evolution of a Glasgow suburb.
