Tag: Glasgow

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The Crossing Place

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A pinch of the River Clyde; a squeezing of the water that flows west through Glasgow towards the sea; a watery place where shipyards once dominated the shoreline and the air shook with the hammering of rivets, the scrape and spark of steel plate, the blinding blue light of arc welding. Across the river, south of the here, lies the city district of Govan, depleted of industry now but once the hub for shipbuilding in the region. Here on the northern bank, at Glasgow Harbour on the site of a former shipyard on the edge of Partick, we stand outside the city’s Riverside Museum. The museum is an arresting zinc and glass structure with a steeply curving roofline that resembles a cardiogram – a late work by the Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.

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Afloat in the water in front of the museum, in purposeful contrast, is the handsome three-masted sailing ship Glenlee, a trading ship that after circumnavigating the world four times (and rounding Cape Horn 15 times) ended her nautical life as Galatea, a training vessel for the Spanish Navy. Abandoned and forgotten in Seville the ship was eventually saved by a British naval architect and in 1993 was towed home to Glasgow to end her days on the river of her birth. From the deck of Glenlee we can make out the old buildings of Govan across the water. But there is no way to cross, not outside the summer months anyway, as the seasonal ferry has stopped operating. So it means a retreat on foot back to Partick Subway station to take the Inner Circle beneath the river to reach our goal on the other side.

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Emerging from the subway into the bright sunlight of a gleaming autumn day, the Govan streets seems quiet, provincial even; not quite what we had been expecting. The Victorian buildings have a patina of age but are well-scrubbed, made of sandstone the colour of ginger cake. Govan’s Old Parish Church is built of the same stone.

Govan is the oldest part of Glasgow. Until 1912 it was a separate burgh that was historically part of Lanarkshire. Once a centre for the ancient Kingdom of Strathclyde or Alt Clut, it was the northernmost part of the Cumbric (a variant of Brythonic or Old Welsh)-speaking region of Hen Ogledd* or the Old North. A monastery was founded here in the 7th-century by King Constantine (later to be canonised as St Constantine of Strathclyde and Govan), to whom the Old Govan Parish Church is dedicated. In the early medieval period Govan was ruled from Dumbarton Rock at the mouth of the Clyde on the opposite shore until it was destroyed by Vikings in 870AD. The Kingdom of Strathclyde, the only part of the Old North not to be conquered by Anglo-Saxons, eventually became part of the Kingdom of Scotland in the 11th century.

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Govan Old Parish Church is home to the Govan Stones, a remarkable collection of 31 grave markers that date back to the 9th century. The church, a fine Scottish Gothic Revival building, is not so old but it stands on a sacred site that was in existence long before the Normans came to dominate the lands to the south. Our timing is impeccable – October 31, the Celtic festival of Samhain – is the last day of the year on which the church is open. As our enthusiastic Scottish-Canadian guide explains, it is too expensive to keep the church heated for the winter months and so it is locked up for the duration.

IMG_7566 The stones are arranged around the church interior so as to make a circuit. There is intricate Celtic lattice work on the first two – the ‘Sun Stone’ and the Jordanhill Cross – and on the third, the ‘Cuddy Stane’, a representation of a man on a horse, or possibly a donkey (‘cuddy’) bearing a Christ figure. A group of five Viking hogbacks, dark and heavy, and resembling those giant slugs that sometimes venture out along garden paths after rain, dominate the transept.  Unnoticed until is pointed out to us, the paws of a supine bear clutch one of the stones at its corners, a complex symbol that combines animal strength and tenderness and might, perhaps, relate to the high-ranking Viking it commemorates. The highlight of the collection is probably the Govan Sarcophagus, the only one of its kind from the pre-Norman era, which was unearthed in the graveyard in 1855. This intricately carved structure is thought to have once held the remains of King Constantine himself, although its symbols suggest that is more likely to have been made a couple of centuries after his death. Elsewhere are ancient stones that have been recycled as markers for later graves – palimpsests where earlier detail has been erased to allow a new name to be cut into the stone.

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The stone for each of the grave markers, like the church itself, comes from the hills across the Clyde. The feat of moving such a heft of stone might seem Herculean in its endeavour but a millennium ago the river would have been shallower and narrower and there would have been a ford across it; there may even have been stepping stones bridging the two shores. Later, in the medieval period, a ferry would have run between the two banks to transport Highland cattle drovers and their stock across the river to markets south of Glasgow.

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By the 19th century Govan became better known as a centre for shipbuilding. It would go on to achieve fame as the birthplace of strong-willed characters like Jimmy Reed, Sir Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalglish. But long before any ship was launched, Govan was a strategic and spiritual centre where Britonnic, Celtic and Scandinavian worlds overlapped thanks to an important crossing place on the river. If the Govan Stones could speak of those who carved them they would, of course, tell you this… in Cumbric naturally.

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*Hen Ogledd is also the name of an excellent Newcastle-based musical combo whose work sometimes references the early medieval Brythonic world their name suggests

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Gloomy Sunday

It is Sunday in Edinburgh and the city streets are filled with Frenchmen in blue shirts and black berets all come for the Six Nations rugby match against Scotland at Murrayfield stadium. Preferring the game that favours a more spherical ball it seems like a good opportunity to take the train to Glasgow for the day.

The previous day, on our mentioning Scotland’s largest city, Colin, our bed and breakfast host, remarked, “Well, I’m Edinburgh man so I’m biased but I think Glasgow makes the most of what it’s got to be fair.” It is no secret – Edinburgh and Glasgow may be less than 50 miles apart – one hour on the train – but there is a cultural gulf between the two cities. Or so they would have you believe: rough, working class Glasgow versus genteel, middle-class Edinburgh; Billy Connolly versus Miss Jean Brodie; deep-fried pizza versus herb-infused foccacio. This is, of course, a misleading generalisation but it cannot be denied that the two cities do have a markedly different feel. Edinburgh is no longer ‘Auld Reekie’ but a stylish European capital with a beautiful skyline. Glasgow, on the other hand, remains a Victorian city par excellence – famously, the second city of the British Empire. While Edinburgh seems to thrive on its glorious past and embody the spirit of the Georgian Enlightenment, Glasgow, like Manchester and Sheffield over the border in England, is a place in post-industrial transition, a city trying to find its rightful place in the 21st century. Despite its City of Culture makeover a decade or so ago, Glasgow still manages to look a bit threadbare around the edges in a way that central Edinburgh does not. This is only part of the picture though – take a bus out to one of the outlying ‘schemes’ in either metropolis and peripheral Edinburgh looks every bit as unattractive and dysfunctional as the wastelands of outer Glasgow.

In Glasgow, the Willow Tearooms still operates in the city centre, a working shrine to the distinctive secessionist style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, one of the city’s most famous sons. The Glasgow School of Art designed by Mackintosh when he worked as an architect in the city lies just around the corner. The ‘Room de Luxe’ at the top of the stairs is a delight – elegant high-backed chairs, roses in vases and a view through stained glass windows down onto Sauchiehall Street below.  The window glass (original we are told) distorts a little, affording a slightly twisted view of a boarded-up Pound-Mart store opposite, humdrum 1960s and peeling paint. A solitary busker, clearly audible from the tearoom, plays the trumpet to passers-by, belting out jazz standards like Summertime in fast rotation. But summertime it is not – the day is dreich and chilly, the sky the colour of cold porridge – Gloomy Sunday might be a more apposite choice.

A mile or so to the east, beyond Queen Street Station and George Square with its Modern Art Gallery, St Mungo’s Cathedral sits next door to the Royal Infirmary, a proximity that is surely no mere coincidence. Beyond the dark glowering sandstone of the cathedral and across a footbridge (‘the Bridge of Sighs’ utilised by funeral processions) lies the Necropolis – Glasgow’s city of the dead. The most obvious monument, looming high on a Doric column at the top of the hill is a memorial to John Knox, the Protestant reformer but the first that we pass on the winding road uphill is a monument to William Miller, ‘The Laureate of the Nursery’ responsible for the children’s nursery rhyme Wee Willie Winkie, which was originally written in Scots:

Wee Willie Winkie rins through the toon,
Upstairs and doonstairs, in his nichtgoon,
Tirlin’ at the window, cryin’ at the lock,
“Are the weans in their bed? For it’s now ten o’clock.”

We climb the path to the top. Low cloud has drained all colour from the view apart from that of the glowing rust brown of the neo-Norman Monteath mausoleum, which brings to mind an Armenian church but was apparently modelled on the Knights Templar Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Further up, the William Rae Wilson mausoleum is decidedly Moorish, a fitting monument to someone who travelled and wrote about the Middle East. Next to this, the entrance of the Graeco-Egyptian mausoleum of John Houldsworth is flanked by stern white angels, Hope and Charity, while Faith lies within glowing almost praternaturally in the gloom.

The view is the thing here. From the vantage point of the Necropolis it is easier to grasp the scale of Scotland’s largest city, even on a dull day such as this. The concrete, brick and stone of the city centre sprawls to the west beyond St Mungo’s spire and buttresses. Elsewhere, the land dips and rises gently to trace the valleys of Glasgow’s rivers, the Clyde and Kelvin. High-rise housing schemes dot the horizon east and north, an architectural echo of the serried ranks of tombs that line the Necropolis thoroughfares – a world of folk that once belonged to Glasgow’s inner city but now find themselves detached and isolated. If you believe the clichéd image, a realm of ne’er do wells – bampots, malkies, and chiv-wielding neds – but also pensioners, terminally unemployed steel workers, young single mothers and beleaguered immigrants. Whatever the reality, it is a long way from the fancy designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and certainly no place for Wee Willie to wander alone at night.

Heading back to Edinburgh our train squeezes past another returning to Glasgow at Croy station. Not quite as crowded as those we saw heading for Edinburgh on the way there, its carriages are full of middle-aged men in kilts and Scotland rugby shirts. They look somewhat subdued – clearly Scotland has lost the rugby.