A Celtic saint, a royal mistress, an American heiress and eight-year-olds working twelve hours a day for two shillings a week. All feature in the new Strathblane Heritage Trail, launched on 17 May. The two-mile trail has been created by Strathblane Heritage Society....
The Campsie Fells (‘The crooked fairy hills’) lie just a few miles north of Glasgow. They’re the highest and most extensive group of hills that form a more or less continuous range between Dumbarton and Stirling. To the west of the Campsies are the Kilpatrick Hills,...
BALLEWAN Painting of Ballewan House, often known as The Ha', by Connie Simmers BALZEOUN Ballewan is an estate in the Blane Valley that was carved out of the earldom of Lennox. For two centuries it belonged largely to the Craig family, culminating in Milliken Craig...
Stained Glass panel from Maryhill Burgh Halls showing bleachfield workers The abundance of water meant that bleaching and water-driven industries were commonplace in the parish in the 18th century and lasted well into the 19th century. By 1870 most of them had closed...
William Rankin McLintock, Private Royal Canadian Dragoons, aged 30. William McLintock’s Gravestone A brief bleak item appeared in the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald in July 1917. Under the headline “Strathblane Soldier Killed”, it noted: “The past week has been a sad...
James McKenzie, Private Royal Lancashire Fusiliers, aged 19. James McKenzie’s family was long established in Strathblane. His father, also James, worked at the waterworks and lived at Dumbrock. His mother Margaret Kennedy, though born in Busby came from an Irish...
Gravestone at Bramshott (St Mary) Churchyard , East Hampshire. Alexander Buchanan Gilchrist, Sergeant/CSM Reserve Canadian Infantry, aged 30. On June 6 1906 Passenger Number 192 boarded the Allan Line’s SS Carthaginian in Glasgow bound for Montreal with the dream of...
Daniel Dugan, Corporal Black Watch, aged 19. Daniel’s Irish-born grandparents had settled in Blanefield in the 1880s. In 1891 the family, including nine children, plus three boarders, are all described as living in a three-roomed dwelling with no running water in New...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
The Strathblane Notebooks Life in a Stirlingshire Village before the First World WarBy Alex Urquhart edited by Anne Balfour Quotation from the headstone of Alex Urquhart's parents in Strathblane Cemetery Alex Urquhart (1894-1978) Strathblane Heritage Society...
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...