LITMIR.BIZ

       Sunday, 19 April

      Took a walk this morning to Queen’s Park before breakfast. After breakfast had a seat in Toryglen Golf Course. After dinner had Tommy out for a brace of hours in Queen’s Park. Mrs Livingstone not out at all. Weather couldn’t be better.

      Walking routes

      Walking has long been a Glasgow way of life. Car ownership has always been lower within the city boundaries than in the richer suburbs and countryside beyond. Even today, the 2001 census shows that Glasgow has the highest percentage of car-free households of all local authority areas in Scotland. This is partly because of the high levels of public transport in the city and partly because of the high levels of relative poverty. Neither of these factors has changed significantly since Thomas’ day.

      Necessity aside, most Glaswegians enjoy the communal aspects of public transport and the street, where chance encounters and opportunities for conversations and exchanges of news abound. Just as Glasgow in the early twentieth century was a great city for teashops and public houses, it was also a great city for ‘windae hingin’, the practice of leaning out of tenement windows, forearms crossed on a blanket or pillow, taking part in the life of the street from one’s window on the world. Times have changed, but Glasgow remains a friendly city – this aspect of city life has even been enshrined in a tourist marketing slogan – and life in the fresh air, however bad the weather, seems to encourage and nurture this.

      Thomas seems to find solace, strength and inspiration in his walks. When his family are away from him, he writes that he feels unsettled, then takes to the open countryside. He walks to visit his father in Bridgeton, his brother in Rutherglen and other family members and friends across the city. But primarily he walks for pleasure, whether it is his regular turn around Queen’s Park before breakfast on Sunday mornings in the summer, his frequent trips through Pollok Estate or over Cathkin Braes, or his solitary rambles to East Kilbride or Barrhead.

      Many of his walks were in public parks. Glasgow may have had horrendous overcrowding problems in some inner-city areas (see ‘Housing and Factors’,), but the ‘Dear Green Place’ was well-served with parks and green spaces. It has often been said, but never quite proved, that Glasgow has more green space per capita than any city in Europe. In Thomas’ day, the city had 31 parks, several outside the city boundaries. The outlying recreational areas included Ardgoil, a ‘Highland ridge of a wild and picturesque nature’ between Loch Long and Loch Goil, according to one guidebook of the period; Balloch Castle and its estate on the shores of Loch Lomond; Cathkin Braes Park; Rouken Glen; and the Linn Park. Thomas mentions walking over Cathkin Braes and having tea in Rouken Glen, but he would be aware of the other parks and estates, even those beyond the reach of the tram network.

      Queen’s Park was opened in September 1862, on the 143 acres of Pathhead Farm that the Glasgow Corporation (the city council) purchased five years earlier. English architect and garden designer Sir Joseph Paxton advised on the layout, and much of the work to turn the farm into a park was carried out by the unemployed. The queen of the title is not Victoria but Mary Queen of Scots, whose forces were defeated in 1568 at the Battle of Langside, on the southern boundary of the park.

      Rouken Glen was gifted to the city by Archibald Cameron Corbett, later Lord Rowallen, in 1906. Its celebrated features include a ‘Highland Glen’ complete with falls, cliffs and crags. The picturesque waterfall, which is surrounded by steep woodland, was formed from a smaller natural waterfall, which was doubled in height in the early part of the nineteenth century to feed a reservoir that supplied a print works on the Auldhouse Burn at Thornliebank.

      Cathkin Braes, a large expanse of natural hillside, is sited five miles south of the city centre. It includes one of the highest points on the south side of the city and affords spectacular views over greater Glasgow and as far north as Ben Lomond and Ben Ledi. The natural environment of the park includes ancient woodland, grassland, heath and scrub, with many long-established paths through the park giving a constantly changing environment and view. What is now the eastern portion of Cathkin Braes Country Park was gifted to the city in 1887 by James Dick, who had made his fortune in rubber soles, with the condition that it should be kept in a natural state and open for public enjoyment. The western portion was added in 1940.

      Pollok Estate, although not gifted to the city by the Maxwell family until 1967, was a popular haunt of the citizens of Glasgow’s south side in Thomas’ day. Sir John Stirling Maxwell, whose family had owned the estate since the middle of the thirteenth century, gave the people of Glasgow access to the enclosed parkland around Pollok House from 1911. Ramblers such as Thomas would have been attracted by the natural woodlands, farmlands and the activity along the White Cart Water, which flows through the estate and was used to power a sawmill in Thomas’ time. Pollok

       Postcard of Queen’s Park Gates and Victoria Road.

       Postcard of Rouken Glen Park bandstand.

      House, the stately former family home, is now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. This is singularly appropriate, since the informal meeting that set up the trust was hosted by Sir John Stirling Maxwell here in 1931. The district of Cowglen,

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