The high ground behind “Cam’s’lang,” as those name it who know it, is a convenient coign from whence to survey the myriad spires and chimneys of Glasgow; for the river makes only a few more great sweeps through a plain where pleasure-grounds alternate with public works, before reaching Rutherglen—the senior and once the rival of Glasgow—and the Green itself, and disappearing into St. Mungo’s wilderness of houses and canopy of smoke.
Passing strange it is to one who gazes down from Dechmont Hill or from the Cathkin Braes upon the Clyde losing itself in the murky depths of the great city, whose fog and reek and densely packed masses of dwellings seem to fill the valley, to reflect that the spot was originally chosen as a place suitable for seclusion and calm meditation; that so late as the period of the Reformation Glasgow was a country town of three or four thousand people. How much of the legendary story of St. Kentigern is founded on fact, none can positively say. But we can certainly believe that he came here and preached to the heathen Britons of Strathclyde, whose capital, Dumbarton, was not far off, and whose “high places” were on the neighbouring hills; that he gathered disciples about him, and founded a monastery, after the old Columban rule, on the slopes beside the clear Molendinar Burn, something more than a mile above its confluence with the waters of Clyde. His shrine is still the centre of the “Laigh Kirk,” or crypt of the Cathedral, and is, indeed, the nucleus around which have grown not only the ancient and beautiful church, but also the vast modern city that bears the name of Mungo “the Beloved.” It is the seed out of which Glasgow has grown.
A map of Glasgow in the early part of the seventeenth century shows it to have then consisted of little more than two streets crossing each other—one running at right angles to and the other parallel with the course of the Clyde—together with a few tributary vennels and closes, and with “kailyards” rendering upon the open fields. The former thoroughfare, as the Saltmarket and High Street, climbed the slope to the Metropolitan Church and the Bishop’s Castle; the other diverged to right and left as the Gallowgait and the Trongait, which latter extended as far as the precincts of the church, croft, and well of St. Tenu—transmogrified by time and wear into St. Enoch’s—in the line of the present Argyll Street. At the intersection were the Mercat Cross and the Tolbooth, prison and council chamber in one. The Cross was, accordingly, the centre of the commerce and of the municipal authority of Old Glasgow. The venerable Tolbooth and Cross Steeples still look down upon a busy scene. Still are they redolent of the memories of the citizens and the burgh life of former times: spite of change, they continue to be haunted by the spirit of Bailie Nicol Jarvie picking his way along the street, accompanied by his lass and lantern, to visit Francis Osbaldistone behind prison walls, and of Captain Paton’s Nelly bringing an ingredient of that hero’s punch from the West Port Well.
Halfway between the Cross and the Cathedral, on the west side of a thoroughfare which three hundred years ago was accounted spacious and even stately, were the old College Buildings, where the University, founded in 1450, was housed until, a quarter of a century ago, the intrusion of the railway and other considerations made it flit to more splendid and salubrious quarters at Gilmorehill.
THE CLYDE AT GLASGOW.
In this oldest core of Old Glasgow, there are but few relics left of its buildings mid monuments of early times. The Cathedral is the chief; and, happily, the grey shape of this grand old Gothic pile remains to put to shame even the finest of the modern edifices of which Glasgow is so proud. It is, like most other minsters, of many dates; but there is great harmony as well as dignity both in its exterior and interior aspect, its style being mainly that of the First Pointed, or Early Decorated, period. Only a fragment, in the crypt or lower church, is supposed to remain of the building with which Bishop Joscelin 700 years ago replaced the previous edifice of wood. Within, the solemn grandeur of the lofty groined roof, and the long receding array of arches of the nave, chancel, and choir of the High Kirk, with the perspective closed by the magnificent east window, awe all beholders. But still more impressive are the wonderful clusters of pillars, the low-browed arches, and the dim and obscure “religious light” of the crypt underneath. “There are finer minsters in the kingdom than Glasgow,” says Dr. Marshall Lang, the present minister of the Barony Parish, “but there is none with a finer crypt.” In the centre of the darkling maze is the shrine of St. Mungo, the position of which, in the sloping ground falling eastward towards the Molendinar, is the key to the construction of the church. After the Reformation, the crypt became the Laigh Barony Church before there was set up, in the Cathedral green without, what Dr. Norman Macleod, one of its later incumbents, called “the Temple of Ugliness,” which has in its turn given place to the handsome structure that is the parish church of the old Bishop’s Barony. The famous Dr. Zachary Boyd—he who, in the High Church above, railed at Cromwell to his face—was minister for nearly thirty years in the Laigh Barony; and from behind its pillars Rob Roy spoke his warning word into the ears of the English stranger.
While Time and reforming zeal—aided by the voices and pikes of the citizens of the day—have spared to us St. Mungo’s Church, the fortress-like Bishop’s Palace and the “Manses” of the thirty prebends and other ecclesiastics have been swept away, along with memorials of earlier and later date; St. Roche’s Chapel, in the fields to the north, now flaunts a smoky pennon as St. Rollox; the high ground of the “Craigs,” or the “Fir Park,” across the once limpid trouting burn—where St. Columba is fabled to have met St. Kentigern—is covered with the thicket of headstones and obelisks of the Necropolis, grouped about Knox’s monument, and holds the dust of some of the host and most distinguished of Glasgow’s sons; the Molendinar itself has been buried from sight and smell—none too soon.