BOTHWELL CASTLE.
The left, or Blantyre, bank of Clyde also has its “stately images of the past.” The barony, which had belonged to Randolph and to “Black Agnes of Dunbar,” fell, with the Priory lands, to Walter Stewart, the first Baron Blantyre, James VI.’s old classfellow and favourite, whose descendant still bears the title. Blantyre Priory had in its day sheltered Wallace. They will show you the rock, one of many, from which, in legend, the patriot leaped to escape his enemies. It was a daughter-house of the Abbey of Jedburgh, which, like other great Tweedside monasteries, had a retreat in the Clyde, when invading armies crossed the Border. Now the rifled and wasted monk’s nest is itself besieged by the clamorous army of labour. In a nook by the waterside, between it and Bothwell Bridge, David Dale and John Monteith planted their calico-printing and turkey-red works—those Blantyre mills which have since thriven so mightily, and under whose shadow David Livingstone was born. Blantyre village grows to a town on the bank above, and behind are the pit shafts of High Blantyre, reminding us of one of the saddest of colliery catastrophes.
Photo: T. & R. Annan & Son, Glasgow.
GLASGOW UNIVERSITY (p. [358]).
Escaping from the shadow of Bothwell’s braes, our river flows smoothly on between widening haughs and opening prospects within sight of Uddington, where Glasgow has planted a colony of villas, by a long serpentine sweep past the parks and trees of Dalbowie, and so under the steep wooded bluff of Kenmuir, long renowned for its wild flowers and its “Wedding Well,” to Carmyle, a hamlet that still, in spite of the close neighbourhood of the great city, retains something of rural quaintness and simplicity in its rushing mill-dams and its climbing garden plots. Cambuslang is only a mile below, but on the other or southern bank, along a reach of river beautifully fringed by trees—Cambuslang, with its high-placed church tower, its Kirkton burn bickering down its ravine past the golf-course and the amphitheatre where Whitfield uplifted his voice in the great “Revival Wark” of 1742; and with Rosebank, the home of David Dale, on the river front, shouldered by dye works and neighboured by the fine new railway bridge over the Clyde.
THE BROOMIELAW LANDING-STAGE.