AYRMOUTH.
THE CLYDE.
Clydesdale and its Waters—“The Hill of Fire”—Douglasdale—“Castle Dangerous”—Bonnington Linn—Corra Linn and “Wallace’s Tower”—Lanark—The Mouse Water—Stonebyres Linn—The Nethan and “Tillietudlem”—“The Orchard of Scotland”—Hamilton and its Palace—Cadzow Castle and its Associations—Bothwell Brig and Castle—Blantyre—Cambuslang—Rutherglen—Glasgow: The City and its History—The Quays, Docks, and Shipbuilding Yards—The Work of the Clyde Navigation Trust—Govan and Partick—The White Cart—Dumbarton Rock and Castle—The Leven Valley—Ben and Loch Lomond—Greenock—Gourock—The Firth at Eventide.
GLASGOW CITY has, as its chief armorial device, a tree of massive trunk and wide-spreading branches. The minor symbols, of bird and bell and fish, have lost their old significance. The salmon no longer ventures so far up the labour-stained waters of the Clyde as Glasgow Green. No more the monkish bell sounds to matins and vespers on the banks of the Molendinar Burn, now turned by man’s improving hand into a main sewer. The sooty street-sparrow, almost alone among the feathered tribe, is at home under the great city’s pall of smoke.
But more than ever the stately and flourishing tree is an apt similitude, not only of the little cathedral town that has grown to be, as its inhabitants proudly boast, the “Second City of the Empire,” but also of the stream that has nurtured it to greatness. The Clyde, if it is not the longest of course or the largest of volume of Scottish streams, is beyond all comparison the most important from the point of view of industry and commerce. Within its basin are contained something like one-third of the population and half of the wealth and traffic of the Northern Kingdom. Between Dumbarton Rock and the sources of the infant Clyde we are carried from the busiest hives of labour and marts of trade to green or heathy solitudes, whose silence is only broken by the bleat of the sheep and the cry of the muirfowl.
Harking back to the figure of the tree of goodly stem and spread of limb, one has to observe that it is not by any means upon the largest of the branches that immemorial usage has fixed the name of the Clyde. According to the popular saying—
“Tweed, Annan, and Clyde,
A’ rise in ae hillside.”