bfhrutj

STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 5 WILLIAM DEVLYN

STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 5 WILLIAM DEVLYN

STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 5 WILLIAM DEVLYN, PRIVATE HIGHLAND LIGHT INFANTRY, AGED 22. Private William Devlyn, Highland Light Infantry, aged 22 Burnside, Station Road, Blanefield, home of William's mother, Jessie The Mons Star Diary extract from William...

read more
STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 2 ROBERT BLAIR

STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 2 ROBERT BLAIR

STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 2 ROBERT BLAIR, PRIVATE HIGHLAND LIGHT INFANTRY, AGED 33. Robert Blair's grave Posters on Glasgow trams read: "Bantams for the Front -3000 wanted -Apply 46 Bath St." Around 1200 men quickly signed up, every one of them 5ft 3ins or...

read more
STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 1 JOHN YOUNG BARR

STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 1 JOHN YOUNG BARR

STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 1 JOHN YOUNG BARR, LIEUTENANT ARGYLL & SUTHERLAND HIGHLANDERS, AGED 23. Lieut. Barr, Killed April 25, 1915, St Julien. Eric Yarrow's letter of condolence to Jack Barr's sister Morag, May 7 1915, in which he compares the shattered landscape...

read more
Carbeth

Carbeth

Greetings from Carbeth (1930s Postcard) According to John Guthrie Smith’s history of Strathblane, “the compact little estate of Carbeth Guthrie” was constructed between 1808 and 1817 by West Indies merchant John Guthrie. Guthrie was a prominent member of Glasgow’s...

read more
Edenkill/Edenkiln

Edenkill/Edenkiln

View from Old Mugdock Road, where a lone cyclist contemplates the grandeur of the Campsies. Edenkill (now Edenkiln) occupied the heart of the community we now call Strathblane and was one of the three villages that comprised the parish, along with Netherton...

read more
Netherton/Blanefield

Netherton/Blanefield

"Nothing is now left of Old Netherton save the smithy and the school-house, and its very name seems likely to perish, for the factory originally called Blane Printfield has expanded to such ample proportions, and covered its environs with so many workers' houses that...

read more
New website

New website

Derek Townsend from Webreturn has worked with Strathblane Heritage Society to build this new website. The website is designed to be updatable without extensive technical skills, and works on mobile devices such as phones and tablets, as well as laptops and desktops....

read more
Blane Valley Railway

Blane Valley Railway

RAILWAY MANIA By 8.30 on the morning of Monday 1 July 1867 an excited crowd had gathered in Blanefield near the bottom of the Cuilt Brae to greet the community’s first passenger train. Britain was in the grip of railway mania. The 1861 Blane Valley Railway Act...

read more
Water

Water

Local Workmen with the Water BoardLeft to right : Tom McCulloch, Jimmy Baxter, Tommy Miller, David Getty , John Harkins The Glasgow Water Supply The Blane Valley is the final stage of what justifiably can be called one of the greatest civil engineering achievements of...

read more
St Kessog’s Roman Catholic Church

St Kessog’s Roman Catholic Church

Watercolour painting of St Kessog's RC Church by Dr HP Cooper Harrison The opening of St Kessog’s Roman Catholic Church in Blanefield on 28 May 1893 was the culmination of much enterprise in the parish. The number of Roman Catholics had increased through many coming...

read more
Blanefield Printworks

Blanefield Printworks

The Printworks (from John Guthrie Smith 1886. Photograph by John Coubrough) Block printing is the printing of patterns on fabrics using a carved block, usually made from wood. It originated in India around the 5th century BC but did not arrive in Scotland until the...

read more
Parish Church (1216-1982)

Parish Church (1216-1982)

“The church is a beautiful building of modern Gothic, reared in 1803.” Rev Hamilton Buchanan, Second Statistical Account of the Parish of Strathblane, 1841. Strathblane Church, 1897 (Photograph courtesy of Angus Graham) Early History The parish of Strathblane is more...

read more
Free Church

Free Church

John Guthrie Smith records that the neat little church and manse belonging to the Free Church stands on the site of the old village of Netherton and the first ordained minister was the Rev George Rennie. Early records indicate that by 1864 there was a sufficient...

read more
World War One

World War One

Silk postcard sent by gardener Sandy Mitchell, fighting on the Western Front, to his wife Georgina, living in staff quarters at Duntreath. Sandy, a Private in the Scottish Rifles, was killed at Arras in April 1917. He is remembered on Strathblane War Memorial. Boer...

read more
Farming

Farming

Blane Valley from the Cuilt Brae Until the mid-20th century farming was very much an integral part of the life of the parish of Strathblane. The school log contains frequent references to children skipping school to help with the harvest. The Blanefield printworks...

read more
Children’s Home Hospital (1903-1994)

Children’s Home Hospital (1903-1994)

“Often a child made a dramatic recovery on the back of good food, fresh air & loving care” - Margaret McIntyre, who worked at Strathblane Children’s Home Hospital for two periods between 1958 and its closure in 1994.  Penelope Ker  The rapid...

read more
Ballagan

Ballagan

Ballagan House by Frederick Alsop, 1884, from The Parish of Strathblane by John Guthrie Smith, 1886 Strathblane Valley has a long history and Ballagan has been part of it since early times. When a cairn on the estate was opened, a cist containing ashes and a piece of...

read more
This Is Our Parish 1957 -1958 by Harry & Helen Arnold

This Is Our Parish 1957 -1958 by Harry & Helen Arnold

This Is Our Parish 1957 -1958 is based on footage taken by Harry and Helen Arnold during this period. It is three parts. The first is a comprehensive view of life in the Parish focussing on all aspects, from the road sweepers to the trades people and the doctor, the...

read more
Missing Men

Missing Men

For various reasons, a number of men from the parish fell in the First World War yet are not commemorated on the War Memorial. These men are also therefore only briefly mentioned in "A Village Remembers", a book about the men commemorated on Strathblane War Memorial...

read more
A Village Remembers: Strathblane First World War Project

A Village Remembers: Strathblane First World War Project

Families of some of the men on the memorial A Village Remembers (pdf)Download Contents Foreword by the Wright family Introduction by Anne Balfour (nee Johnstone) Jack Barr, inventor’s son Robert Blair, gardener James Cartwright, joiner William Cartwright, storeman...

read more
Strathblane Record of Applications for Parochial Relief 1888-1917

Strathblane Record of Applications for Parochial Relief 1888-1917

The applications for poor relief often survive as a separate series. Between 1845 and 1865 the information they contain is not much less than that in the registers of poor, but they are considerably less detailed than the general registers of poor introduced in 1865. For example, the application forms will not include the religious denomination, and probably there will be no details about dependants or other relatives. They will, however, contain far more entries per year than the registers, partly because of multiple applications from individual paupers, but also because they include the ‘casual poor’, that is, those relieved by the inspector without a decision by the board and therefore not on the poor roll.

read more
Revisiting Strathblane (1881) by William T McAuslane

Revisiting Strathblane (1881) by William T McAuslane

This poem was first printed in the Lennox Herald on 10 September 1881 and was “inscribed to AP Coubrough Esq, Blanefield Printworks”. McAuslane was clearly a friend of the Coubroughs, who owned the Printworks. It may be intended to voice the thoughts of Anthony Park...

read more
The Poems of Thomas Thorpe

The Poems of Thomas Thorpe

The poet Thomas Thorpe was born on 9 March, 1829 in Milton, Dunbartonshire, son of a block printer at the local works. When he was five, he moved with his family to Strathblane. One of his earliest childhood memories was being with his sisters in a wood where wild...

read more
Rambles Round Glasgow by Hugh MacDonald (1854)

Rambles Round Glasgow by Hugh MacDonald (1854)

Hugh MacDonald was a Scottish journalist, poet and author from Glasgow. He wrote for the newspaper the Glasgow Citizen for many years under the pen name ‘Caleb’. He is best known for his book Rambles Round Glasgow, published in 1854 by Thomas Murray and Son.

read more
The Second Statistical Account: Strathblane, by Rev Hamilton Buchanan (1841).

The Second Statistical Account: Strathblane, by Rev Hamilton Buchanan (1841).

The second Statistical Account (or NSA) was initiated by the Sons and Daughters of the Clergy in 1832 and published by Blackwoods and Sons. The first edition, which took the form of 52 quarterly parts, was published between March 1834 and October 1845. A re-issue in 33 county volumes was published between 1841 and 1845. A second re-issue, in 1845, took the form of 15 collected county volumes. The Statistical Accounts of Scotland online service hold digitised versions of the second re-issue.

read more
Gazetteer of Scotland 1803 by F Ray

Gazetteer of Scotland 1803 by F Ray

Ray's Gazetteer, published in 1803, describes the parish of Strathblane in pre-industrial times, stressing the beauty of the Blane Valley with its spectacular views towards the Trossachs. Several errors are worth noting: it is not bounded by the Grampians and the...

read more
The First Statistical Account: Strathblane by Rev Gavin Gibb (1796).

The First Statistical Account: Strathblane by Rev Gavin Gibb (1796).

The first Statistical Account (or OSA) was initiated by Sir John Sinclair and published by William Creech of Edinburgh. It took several years to obtain all the reports and, rather than waiting until he had the complete set in his possession, Sinclair issued volumes as and when there was sufficient content: this means that the reports are not arranged by county or region.

read more