Hamilton town is a cheery place, with colour and ornament in its new buildings: very different from the lowering streets of Glasgow, which we are now nearing. In its present prosperous condition, many old buildings are being removed, but the passer-by will note a quaint tablet over an old house in the chief street, with three moustached lions’ heads, the initials “A. S.” and the inscription:
The . airt . of . weaving . is . renouned . so .
that . rich . nor . poor . without . it . cannot . go .
A very broad and well-kept stretch of road leads from Hamilton to the Clyde at Bothwell Bridge: the famous Brig where the battle so immediately disastrous to the Covenanters was fought, June 22nd, 1679. The bridge representing the one that spanned the river so long ago was built in 1826, and neither it nor the road resembles the old circumstances of the place in any but the remotest degree. The road across Bothwell Brig when the battle was fought was steep and but twelve feet wide. The Covenanters lost the day entirely through the internal dissensions among their own forces. Each officer wanted to be commandant, and while they were bitterly wrangling about this point, up came the Royalist forces under the Duke of Monmouth and “bloody Claverse,” otherwise Graham of Claverhouse, the “bonnie Dundee” of the famous ballad. The Covenanting army was well placed for defence, and the day might, in other circumstances, have gone in their favour, but as it was, they were defeated, with a slaughter of three hundred. Twelve hundred prisoners were taken. Of these, some were executed: many were shipped to the plantations in Barbadoes. Thus was avenged the initial Royalist defeat by the hands of the Covenanters at Drumclog, on the 1st of June.
It was not until 1903 that the tall obelisk now standing the north side of the bridge was erected, to commemorate the Covenanters who fought and fell “in defence of civil and religious liberty, for Christ’s Crown and Covenant.”
BOTHWELL BRIDGE.
BOTHWELL
The red ruins of the ancient castle of Bothwell stand in the neighbouring park belonging to the Earl of Home. The little town of Bothwell, with its finely rebuilt church, fringes the road: in the churchyard a highly decorative monument of terra-cotta and mosaics to the memory of Joanna Baillie, the poet, with quotations in praise of the scenery around Bothwell. The scenery is still (what is left of it) fine, but since the day when Joanna Baillie wandered in Bothwell’s braes, and corresponded with Sir Walter Scott, the suburbs of Glasgow have swept over the scene; and henceforward the way to Glasgow is not rural.