A Walk in the Park E-Book

John Cairney

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 280

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A wander through twelve of Glasgow's finest parks, and through the mind of a treasured Glasgow resident, John Cairney. Cairney's exploration of his home city's dear green places ranges from Tollcross Park in the east, to the Botanic Gardens, pride of the West End, and even right out to Hogganfield Loch in the city's furthest reaches. Written with a deep love of the city, A Walk in the Park takes us on a journey into Glasgow's past as well as through its outdoor spaces. Cairney traces his city's history back a millennium to its founding by that great wanderer, St Mungo. Through the stories of its parks Glasgow comes to life, a post-industrial city with an unmatched individuality, a thriving cultural scene, and a lot to look forward to.

Leseprobe

JOHN CAIRNEY is well known to audiences in Scotland and internationally through his one-man shows about Burns. Indeed, in many minds he is synonymous with the Bard and is considered as one of the leading interpreters of the works of Robert Burns.

In more than 50 years as an artist, he has worked as an actor, recitalist, lecturer, director and theatre consultant. He is also a published author and an exhibited painter. Trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he was a notable Hamlet at the Citizens’ Theatre and a successful Macbeth at the Edinburgh Festival. He was also This Man Craig on television and has appeared in many films, including Jason and the Argonauts and Cleopatra.

Cairney gained a PhD from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and has travelled internationally as a lecturer, writer and consultant on Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Robert Burns. He has written books on each of these famous Scots, as well as on football, theatre and his native Glasgow, where he now lives with his New Zealand wife, actress and scriptwriter, Alannah O’Sullivan.

For further information, see www.johncairney.com

By The Same Author

Miscellaneous Verses

A Moment White

The Man Who Played Robert Burns

East End to West End

Worlds Apart

A Year Out in New Zealand

A Scottish Football Hall of Fame

On the Trail of Robert Burns

Solo Performers

The Luath Burns Companion

Immortal Memories

The Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson

The Quest for Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Heroes Are Forever

Glasgow by the way, but

Flashback Forward

Greasepaint Monkey

The Sevenpenny Gate

Burnscripts

The Importance of Being

The Tycoon and the Bard

A Walk in the Park

Exploring the Treasures of Glasgow’s Dear Green Places

JOHN CAIRNEY

Luath Press Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2016

eBook edition 2017

eISBN: 978-1-910324-90-5

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Text and illustrations © John Cairney 2016

To all park users everywhere who enjoy

a walk in the open.

To enjoy the fresh air or just wander

with their thoughts.

Glasgow

Contents

The Parks

Foreword

Preamble

Introduction

PARK 1: Glasgow Green

PARK 2: Tollcross Park

PARK 3: Alexandra Park

PARK 4: Hogganfield Loch Park

PARK 5: Springburn Park

PARK 6: Botanic Gardens

PARK 7: Victoria Park

PARK 8: Kelvingrove Park

PARK 9: Bellahouston Park

PARK 10: Pollok Country Park

PARK 11: Queen’s Park

PARK 12: Rouken Glen Park

An Inner City Extra

Conclusion

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Suggested Further Reading

Ode to a Park

Any green space is a park to me It’s there to offer, for all to see. All for free and a change of view For city people just like you. A park is not defined by its size It’s really a space built to surprise By what’s round the corner or over the hill Beckoning and calling your feet, until They can only respond by going Along the path directed, knowing It will lead to other pleasures. Treasures of sight and sound A riot of colour trimly bound In beds of flowers, by bush and rock And as you walk you can take stock Of butterflies and begging squirrels And rowdy children on roundabout whirls, Notice courting couples wander By the softer places yonder Near the umbrella of sheltering trees Where they may do as lovers please Away from the crowd In their own happy cloud Safely held in the dance of romance That’s played in every park From early day till falling dark.

The Parks

Foreword

I’M FLATTERED and honoured to have been approached by John Cairney to write a foreword for his wonderful book celebrating our city’s parks. I’m sure it will appeal to a wide audience for it is not simply about Glasgow’s well-loved green places. It also explores what it means to be a Glaswegian, our city’s rich history and the huge sense of pride our citizens share.

From small beginnings, Glasgow grew from a small rural settlement on the River Clyde to become the largest seaport in Britain. Its journey from a humble, medieval bishopric and royal burgh, to a major centre of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century is well documented. It was the Clyde, the lifeblood of this city, that helped Glasgow make its fortune as one of Great Britain’s main hubs of transatlantic trade with North America and the West Indies.

The ushering in of the Industrial Revolution saw an explosion in the city’s population, size and economy. This earnt it a reputation as one of the world’s pre-eminent centres for chemicals, textiles and engineering, most notably in the shipbuilding and marine engineering industry, which produced many innovative and famous vessels. Throughout the Victorian era, Glasgow’s status as an industrial and commercial powerhouse led to it being referred to as ‘The Second City of the Empire’.

‘People Make Glasgow’ is our latest marketing slogan and it’s proved immensely successful. Quite simply it resonates across the globe for it recognises that it is our people, above all, who have made our city great. The people, across history, helped build Glasgow and its reputation as the friendly city.

As a proud Glaswegian, I’m also able to confirm that Glaswegians possess a fierce sense of justice and fairness and have an unfailing ability to see humour in adversity. These quintessential qualities have made them resilient. They truly are this city’s greatest asset. They have allowed it to reinvent itself and flourish into the modern, exciting vibrant, multicultural and welcoming city it is today.

Glasgow is also a city that has had a clutch of accolades bestowed upon it including: European City of Culture; City of Architecture and Design; City of Science and UNESCO City of Music. I’m sure you’ll agree there is a lot to recommend it.

It would be remiss of me, in light of the author’s talents, not to acknowledge that this is also a city that has a reputation for artistic endeavour. Glasgow, as well as being home to art galleries and museums with world-class collections, is also a magnet for the creative arts. Scottish Ballet, Glasgow School of Art, the Royal Conservatoire, BBC and STV have all made their home here.

We are also fortunate to belong to a city of great natural beauty. Our parks are hugely valued by everyone. They are the essence of Glasgow – our dear green place. I trust this book will entertain and inform you about our parks, this city and its people.

Sadie Docherty, Lord Provost of Glasgow

Preamble

I HAVE TO STATE quite clearly at the outset that this is NOT a guidebook to Glasgow. I prefer to think of it as a series of 12 short essays by a native ‘weegie’ unashamed to trumpet his love of the place and pleased by the chance to offer, in his modest volume, a considered tribute to one of his city’s lesser-known assets – its parks. These essays contain comment, historical information, ideas and anecdotes as they arise during the author’s perambulations. These cultivated areas within the extensive urban span are an increasingly important element in the attempt to meet the environmental needs of a future generation and continuing work on them is therefore vital and to be encouraged. They are the initial factors that inspired the book in the first place and the stimulations received in the walks gave the pages their content. What struck me right away, that the park, wherever it was situated, was a living thing. But then, that depends on how one defines life.

Life is in the slip of a smile on the Mona Lisa’s face The first notes of a nightingale in the forest, And in the gathering of clouds around a new moon And in the love between people, Which makes living almost worshipful

Parks are not perhaps the first thing that one associates with Glasgow, so it may come as a surprise to learn that there are more of them in my home city than in any other city of equivalent size in Britain. There are no less than 90 officially listed green spaces within the city and there would be even more were the list to reach out and include public land available in fertile areas within the Greater Glasgow borders that mark the old Strathclyde.

The truth is that Glasgow is green and getting greener every day. Behind the traditional tenements, beyond the towering glass and concrete office boxes, beside the ubiquitous motorways and underneath the railway bridges you will find the inevitable greenery. Some city parks are the size of a regular garden and others of a small county. We have them all sizes in Glasgow. It is this allocation of green per head of population that makes the city literally, as well as historically, a ‘dear green place’.

Another fact, borne out by Joe Fisher’s Glasgow Encyclopedia, is that Glasgow’s parks are something of a horticultural phenomenon. Not just for their hectares of green grass, or the sheer number of trees to be seen, but also for their stupendous floral spread. Comparisons with respective acreages tells us there are more flowers in any single Glasgow park than there are in the whole city of Paris!

Mais oui, c’est vrai!

Interestingly, it was a French author, Montesquieu, who pointed out that the character of any nation is defined by its climate. It is ironic therefore, that even now in Paris, 195 countries are meeting in an attempt to arrive at a global deal that will tackle the growing problem of climate change. They are discussing plans for a worldwide reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to zero in the next half century. Hopefully the agreed upon terms will include loans to poorer countries and will assist them in making regular reports about emission-cutting targets. The goal is to limit global temperature rise, and at the same time reduce carbon emissions worldwide. Unfortunately, everyone has to agree on what action has to be taken and international solidarity is difficult to achieve on any subject. In this respect, mankind has always been its own worst enemy. In ancient days it was the strong in physique who won the day, then as we became more sophisticated it was the strong in guile. Soon we were divided into rich and poor, black and white, large and small, the educated minority or the uneducated, any demarcation would do as long as it lent power, however temporary, and gave justification to any wilful, gainful act.

So the centuries rolled on and crushed the greater good in the interests of the greedy few who manipulated the many, whatever cult or fashion was in vogue. There have always been divisions and differences down the long trail of history and we, in our time, are little changed. If there was no battle brewing an excuse would be found to start one because the basic aim was power. Power meant territory and territory meant money.

And now Nature itself appears to have joined the conspiracy against the common good. Today we have strong winds that nearly blow you off your feet and heavy rainstorms, the weight and force of which have not been seen in Britain for years. Recently rivers flooded their banks to such an extent that motor­ways were closed, railway lines washed out and thousands of homes flooded throughout the north of England and southern Scotland. It’s as if somebody or something is angry with humanity and is trying to tell us something. We’d better listen and listen well, before it’s too late. Appreciation of nature and what we may be irreparably damaging is surely as essential as international conferences?

We must find our way back to Mother Nature again. And where better to start than the park, or at least its equivalent open space. To walk is to talk with your body; to adjust every muscle movement to the strict rhythm of your own heart beat. And like anything done with the heart, it can only come out well, despite any doubts we might have about our legs. As the saying goes, ‘It is the heart that makes the man.’

Introduction

Oh, Beautiful City of Glasgow, That stands on the River Clyde, How happy must the people be That in you reside. You are the greatest city of the present day Whatever anybody else might say!

WILLIAM McGONAGALL

THIS SNATCH OF McGonagall may not be high poetry but it is right on the mark as an indication of Glasgow’s status in 2016. The city enjoyed a specially designated Green Year in 2015 and it was this fact alone that prompted this book. There is certainly, in the place, at the time of writing, a determined undertaking by the City Council to draw public attention to a hitherto underrated municipal asset, its many public parks.

To walk in a park is something we decide to do, not just the confirmed dog walkers, joggers, health enthusiasts, etc, but ordinary pedestrians who just like to walk, an act most of us elect to do without thinking. We just throw one foot out and the other follows – but every walk, no matter where, over street, roadway, mountain track or park, is different because it’s in another place at another time. My father used to tell me that any walk is only from here to there. It’s just as far as you can see. He said it was no use worrying about what was around the corner or over the hill, you need to get to where you can see it for yourself; to anticipate troubles is not productive, it only adds to the anxieties that might lie ahead.

Any trip calls for sensible planning and the accepting of any hazards encountered. We deal with its stages as they happen, that way we miss nothing. There is no feeling like the footfall. It is a natural act that allows the other senses to kick in. You can look up and around as you will, without the restrictions of driving or navigating public transport. You can sing, or talk to a friend – or to yourself, there is no better friend after all. There is no need to hurry or worry while walking – we do that in life all the time. When we walk we can just give in to the moment.

Conversely, perhaps the best thing about park walking is that we don’t have to talk to anyone at all if we don’t want to. A walk is a rare chance to enjoy some healthy musing and reap the medicinal benefits of silence. With the calm it allows we can react immediately to whatever the body is trying to tell us. But the point is, we have to listen. When young Chopin was ill in Warsaw, he was told to walk as much possible. Could it be he picked his wonderful melodies out of the Polish air as he did so?

In our own day, Chris McCulloch Young organised an outdoor event entitled, Walk a Mile in My Shoes on the same Chopin principal, that a walk can do you nothing but good. The McCulloch principle is to walk with someone for a mile, talking as you go, for at least a half an hour. This gives an opportunity to share the experience with a stranger, who will not remain a stranger for long as you step out; two friends will finish the exercise. No training is needed, no qualifications, just pick a pal and a park and get started. This is easily done in Glasgow, for as Mr McCulloch says, ‘You walk into Glasgow and it’s a city that thinks it a village, everyone wants to talk to you and hear your stories and tell you theirs.’

This is easy in a park, especially in a Glasgow park. Let the last word be with Chris McCulloch: ‘On the Walk in the Green… everyone is on a level playing-field. It’s about breaking down barriers and seeing how fabulous people are.’

Glasgow couldn’t agree more as witness its current municipal slogan – People Make Glasgow.

Alone, out with only the wind around us and with no responsibilities, other than to keeping moving, we can respond to feelings. We react to the emotions green spaces arouse and to all we see or hear around us while in them. Anything goes on a walk, particularly a walk in the park. Although a walk anywhere is healthful, it is particularly so in a park. All parks are man-made, but from a natural source. They are formed primarily to provide the ultimate freedom – to breathe in and step out, to enjoy the walk and feel the better for it. Park space was, and still is for many Glasgow citizens, a vital ingredient of their necessary escape grid second only to the cinema.

Each of the city’s green resorts, in its different way, fed hungry minds at their most inquiring, and people also ate up what the parks had to offer scenically, especially in their own local districts. Parks were once the prime recourse in hard times because they were the cheapest, the most available and the least demanding. A visit to the park was just a matter of walking. And what could be a simpler action? After all, feet were made for walking. And they do just that in numbers in Glasgow, whatever the weather. The ground below may be summer green, autumn brown or winter grey, but the Glaswegian gets out there.

The truth is, it is the citizen element, the human environmental, which really makes any conurbation the living place it is, whatever its geographical location. Glasgow itself is on the same latitude as Moscow. However, it is set right at the edge of north-west Europe, and, until recently at least, it was favoured by westerly Atlantic winds and it is sheltered by hills to the north, the east and the south. This means that temperatures have long been constant, never too warm in summer or unbearably cold in winters – although admittedly the city has its quasi-arctic winter moments with snow, and rain is always a problem.

What I found incredible in personally researching these parks was that the land that was to become my land was once part of an immense forest in a country that was first called Caledonia by the invading Romans before it become Scotland. Originally it lay on a coastal plain on the edge of a shallow sea just above the Equator. In that far-distant geological phase the landmass was unattached to England and boasted a tropical climate. However, even then great changes threatened, and very gradually came about. The earth moved, rivers brought down sand and mud, the rains came, great hurricanes blew, and what is now central Scotland was moved to the north west, up to the very rim of Europe where it has remained ever since, stuck to England, a hand-reach away from Ireland and a decent swim away from France.

In comparison with this primeval activity, the initial emergence of parks in Scotland is a recent phenomenon. In the first decades of the 19th century Glasgow was a thriving trading centre, rich in profits from the export of African peoples to America and the return import of cotton for factories all over Britain, she was riding high in the market-place. The Glasgow merchant was right up there with the times, and so the Merchant City was developed in Glasgow city centre as an integral part of this municipal success. Huge profits were made and lost but funds were suddenly made available to city leaders and park development was only one of the many projects initiated. This is the kind of public spirited action that typifies the city today, even as it goes forward in its modern surge towards a new identity.

This optimistic attitude is typified by the drive to ‘go green’ and create even more leisure spaces for the public good. This move towards environmental responsibility and the continuing focus on common space is the sort of thing that is giving a Glasgow a good name at the moment. The name itself ‘Glasgow’ (never Glas-COW as I’ve heard it called around the world!) comes from a Celtic/Pictish/Gaelic amalgam meaning ‘green’, which is why it has long been known as The Dear Green Place. Green is currently fashionable. It is good for everything, for health, for appearance and for growth, and Glasgow certainly has grown considering how inauspicious its beginnings were. These beginnings were frugal to say the least, but have won the fight to rise in its own way, even if on some days the old bruises show. The city’s development over nearly 900 years is indeed remarkable. It began with a cathedral, soon had a university and then had its market-place; all the ingredients that make any city. The only difference is that Scotland’s largest city was entirely self-made. No matter what changes occur – political, material or climatic – Glasgow will always be Glasgow. Despite its persistent rough and ready image, and all the accruing clichés and misrepresentations that have clung to its image over the years, it will never let a good thing go to waste.

Glasgow still has the honour of creating the first ever space allocated to the common people for their grazing animals or leisure use. This fundamental event occurred in 1450, when Bishop Turnbull gifted the area of land by the river which was to become Glasgow Green, the first-ever park or green space for leisure and recreation in Britain. The very much later Victorian municipal parks system which was to grow out of this area was originally devised by James Cleland, the City Statistician and Superintendent of Public Works, in 1813.

Steps towards the parks system had already been taken as early as the mid-18th century, but the serious work was carried out by the Victorians around 1813 and their mark is still visible to this day. Glasgow Green was extensively extended in the course of the next century by succeeding Park Superintendents like James Weston and Duncan McLellan who confirmed the parks as a unique recreational and cultural asset to latter-day Glasgow. It is to men like these that Glasgow owes its impressive park heritage. A heritage that led Glasgow ultimately to become originator of its own Garden Festival in 1988, the European City of Culture in 1990, host of the World Orchid Show in 1993, the City Parks Conference of 1994 and also a setting for the World Rose Convention in 2007. All this park work still goes on, as the new Peace Garden development adjacent to the Tramway Art Gallery and Performance Area in Albert Drive, not far from the home of Scottish Ballet in Pollokshaws Road, now shows. And, by the way, the city was also named European City of Architecture in 1999. Not bad for a place that’s still only associated in many minds with working boots, booze and bunnets!

Life in Glasgow today is, for true Glaswegians at least, centred on conversation. The chat or the patter, as they call it, is a way of life for many – pithy, realistic and to the point, talk is the thing. Never waste words but never abuse them either, unless you’re trying to get a laugh of course. And life’s a laugh, or at least you’ve got to make it seem so. Wherever one goes in Glasgow, whoever one meets, even in a park, there’s always a laugh in it. Humour is the first resort in any situation for any Glaswegian, their first survival weapon.

Behind the ready tongue, however, is a big heart. Any visitor to the city will understand this very quickly, for the citizens of the place will come to him or her without inhibition and with complete ease. Glasgow doesn’t believe in strangers; the Glaswegian sees everyone as a pal first, and one has to earn the right to be an enemy. That’s why the Glasgow native will talk to anybody. I know that to define a person merely by their location is often to denigrate them, but there is no doubt that the born and raised Glaswegian has a particular aura that is unique. It is compounded largely of irreverence and yet, beneath it all is a basic kindness and quite unexpected warmth and generosity.

Not everyone, however, loves Glasgow. Eugen D’Albert, a noted early 20th-century composer and pianist, was born in the city when his father was working in Glasgow as a music teacher. Eugene made no secret of his dislike of the place and as soon as he could he returned to Germany, where he enjoyed a busy musical career and made something of a career out of marriage, too – as he got hitched six times! The late Dirk Bogarde, of British film fame, told me personally how much he loathed Glasgow while he was at Alan Glen’s school as a boy. He was only there because his mother was a Glaswegian, and insisted that he, like her, should be educated in Glasgow. Dirk escaped to the army just before the end of the Second World War, and he never could understand what anybody saw in his mother’s birthplace. In short, Glasgow, however atypical its historical image, is today a bustling, thriving, forward-looking metropolitan hub.

Today’s world is obsessed by differences – whether it’s in language or colour or religious belief. Difference appears to be an essential element in defining not only nationality but personal identity, forgetting that we are all basically identical under the skin no matter the variety of shields we proffer. Nowhere can this be better seen when people are away from their own environment and comfortable associations. Even in a park, away from their known ties and comforting familiarities and out in the open in the fresh air, Glaswegians tend to ‘perform’ – but not for long.

The public park is the place where your most basic identity is thrust upon you. The visitor is open to its effects, fresh air, colour and freedom from the normal restrictions. There are few locked doors in a park, there are no curtains to close discreetly, no blinds to pull down. You get what you can see, whether it’s a good view or a coffee in the garden centre. Parks are no longer open from dawn to dusk as they once were. Many are now open at all times to all comers. I am told by those in charge of such things that it’s a matter of costs, particularly in the payment of wardens, park keepers and rangers. The positive effect is that parks are there for anyone as long as they can see where they are going. The basic thing to remember may be that when walking in the open, the best view you might get in the end is of yourself. A park is a total parallel of life in that you find your path, if you’re lucky. We are lucky to have so many in our beautiful, ever changing city.

How then, in less than a thousand years, did Glasgow develop into the city full of parks it is today? We must first consider its motto ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’. It originally ended with ‘by the preaching of the Word and the Praising of his Name’. In other words, the city had a totally religious foundation. However, Glasgow is now centuries away from its missionary beginnings. It is, nevertheless, a fact that its beginnings were holy. This is specifically due to a young monk with aristocratic blood, St Kentigern, better known by his later pet name, Mungo, who travelled across southern Scotland from Fife seeking a burial place for his church mentor, Fergus. (The story is dealt with more fully in chapter 5).

Metaphorically, if we liken Glasgow’s growth to our own accepted seven ages we see that its infancy was indeed church-led and its early development entirely missionary. Its later child­hood was rural and lightly agricultural, developing into riparian village activities as early commercial industries, like mills, took advantage of its riverside location. The city’s proximity to the sea endowed it with its later port possibilities and led to the immense profits made in the 18th century from the slave and tobacco trades in what could be called Glasgow’s youth. Its early manhood was celebrated by the building of homes and businesses, eventually tenements and factories, and the cultivation of land as commercial property. The weavers arrived in Glasgow’s middle age which bloomed as railways took over from shipping and led later to heavy armaments for the Great War of 1914 and to even higher profits. Then followed something of a dip as the Depression years between the two World Wars coincided with what could be termed as Glasgow’s old age, which was ironically saved only by the war of 1939. Bullets and shells can always be relied upon to boost the economy.

The present day boom in Glasgow is, without doubt, a second childhood of pop culture, the arts and a clutch of Turner Prize winners. And all this was very much against the odds. The plain truth, and one which should be have been guessed, is that under the clichéd cloth cap there are brains, the blistered hands are nimble, the feet in the working boots can dance, and the abrasive voice can sing. The slightest acquaintance with Glasgow shows this, just as any walk in its parks might do. It is no misnomer to think of a park as an open space. You can only be ‘in the open’ while you’re there. Perhaps the openness is the effect of the wind in your face. It certainly gets rid of the cobwebs.

Every park is its own unique place and there is a basic bond between local people and these places – who doesn’t remember their childhood home? Or some other special place in the past that spoke clearly to them? We must always bear in mind that whoever we are, wherever we live, at root, it’s the same for all of us, this business of being temporarily in the world. We have to cherish our roots whatever they are, and where better to look for roots than in a park?

On a wider front, we can even consider Scotland’s social evolution in terms of land use. Current criminal investigations arising from the scandal caused by the bribery and corruption discovered at FIFA, the headquarters of world football, bring to mind the subtle operation by the Scottish upper classes over the last 300 years to obtain and retain land and property in Scotland. This was a similar use of elected power for profit, land use, or rather its ownership, has always been a Scottish problem. Property value in land tax alone might have paid for Glasgow’s highly-successful 2014 Commonwealth Games, but the grabbing and keeping of landed property was a sport from which the ordinary people were (and largely still are) totally excluded.

To compound this issue, the same ordinary people were once the common owners of the land they occupied and their clan chiefs were the elders, elected to advise and govern. Soon, the chieftainship became a family matter, and superior peerage was accepted, heritage was established and class was born. Those who had land kept it and those who did not went without. Division was rife and strictly held to at the higher levels. True democracy was merely a dream. Glasgow merchants, on the other hand – the entrepreneurs, like the Glassfords, the Grahams, the Millers and the Bogles – had made their fortunes in the early United States by daring invention and risk with tobacco, cotton and later black slaves. But they gave back much of what they made to their own city by building beautiful houses for themselves and erecting splendid offices in the city centre, many of which still stand, giving the City of Glasgow, a superbly designed inner core.

This inner-city architecture is only another of Glasgow’s under­­rated treasures. Yet even these buildings are at a remove from the common people, who are still now, as when the buildings were first erected, vulnerable to the whims of self-appointed money lords and property masters. A minority ruling class has been upheld for centuries thanks to a carefully-wrought legal system that only sees their point of view. The few still have complete control over the many. Today, 432 people own half of the available land in Scotland. Too few own too much, as Andy Wightman has tried to tell us in his excellent book, The Poor had no Lawyers. Despite recent moves towards some land reform, it may need more than the current Scottish National revival to restore Scotland to its sturdy and independent Scottish selfhood. Today it would seem merely a matter of wardrobe. Chinless, kilted figures posing for photographs hardly defines our racial dignity and scenic sentimentality. They may be good for postcards and tourist brochures but they should be confined to that kind of out-dated nationalism. A new kind of reformation may be called for.

There is no doubt that Scotland has diminished nationally since the hurried 1707 Union and ‘Britain’ is still referred to as ‘England’ by most of the world, where, oddly enough, an old Scottish pride is still maintained by the Scottish diaspora who have emigrated to Canada, the United States, South Africa, South America, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand and to almost everywhere else world-wide. It is a truism that wherever you find banks, football or golf, you can be assured the Scots have been. And who gave the idea of the National Park to America? A Scot, of course, the bearded John Muir from Dunbar. As a direct result, the United States has a magnificent ring of parks today. Sites like Yosemite and Death Valley attract tourists by the millions every year, and everyone wants to walk in Arizona’s Grand Canyon.

In Scotland we may not have such epic ground spaces but those of us who are still native to our own piece of the world have to live with what we’ve got in Glasgow, which should be more than enough for anyone. The status quo