Drumchapel. Bearsden. Castle Hill. Part One. A Walk on the Wild Side.

                                                 ALL PHOTOS CLICK FULL SCREEN

A recent walk I did in early November to capture the last weeks of autumn colour on the trees was a trip to Drumchapel. You can either get a train, or a bus, or park your car here ( a large car park is obvious when you arrive, left of this photo) but I took a no 6a bus to this point. At the bottom of this photo you see the path with railings that takes you up towards the two hi rise blocks. 

 But first, at the start of this path, directly across the main road from the shopping centre, you should see this sign. I've added some extra info and the black dotted route of my alternative walk as it was a cracker I really enjoyed. 

 The view of Drumchapel's western suburb and local park which still has most of it's original housing stock intact as seen from this rising incline path I was on.

 Moving slightly right of the last photo you come to new built housing stock replacing the 1960s massed 3 and 4 storey tenement clusters. If you type in Drumchapel tenements-images... you should see online what they used to look like originally. Like all the big four council tenement estates, one placed at each outer corner of Glasgow in the 1950s and 1960s as in Drumchapel, Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Pollok it's the sheer size of the place that really gets to you. At their peak population density in the 1960s to late 1970s, (when I was a teenager growing up in one) each held between 30.000 to 50, 000 residents. Even today, with less than half that population remaining in them all you can stand on one part of Drumchapel's outer edge and everything in sight, looking the other way, fading into the distance, will still be Drumchapel.  Like all the big four estates it is a massive, sprawling township covering several hills and ridges and that size gives it a gravitas and majesty I always find visually compelling.

 Yet it's also a great place to walk, which is why it always draws me back, decade after decade, since the day it was first built.   Pollok and Castlemilk also.... Easterhouse less so..... being a south and west side dweller all my life not so keen on the East End for some reason....although I've worked there often enough in the past. Landscape wise there's fewer hills in the East End of Glasgow which is mostly flat ground.  Anyway, as you can see the path swings around under the flats, and meanders nicely past the Glasgow Club Donald Dewar Centre (a building containing a group of enclosed outdoor football pitches with several basketball courts indoors, currently used as a Covid vaccination hub.)...

 

And then a children's play park with zip line, chute, swings, and basket ball courts- also a concrete skate board park. It was a dry and warm day but all these facilities were deserted. Normally, in any other city park I've been in with good weather you would expect to see some children and families playing and well attended at this time of day but although I passed several of these play areas scattered around not one person was on or near them.  Strange. The complaint with the big four and other large council estates in Glasgow used to be that they moved people from inner area slums where housing conditions were often appalling but they did have cinemas, pubs, shops and dance halls close by whereas in the early estates you had row after row of tenements and very little else. They have made efforts to improve that situation.. but do children play outside anymore when modern bedrooms are filled with entertaining gadgets? One main reason we always played outside in the 1960s is that we had very little in our bedrooms to keep us amused and the TV set was black and white, 12 inches in size, with two, often boring, TV channels so not much in the way of stellar attraction back then. 

    Anyhow, several paths snake through open meadows on the Drumchapel Way so you do not have to go into the housing clusters at any point if you don't want to do so.

 

In fact parts of Drumchapel are so wild and open now you would swear you were in the heart of the countryside. This is the view near the highest central part, right in the middle of the scheme where, until around 20 to 30 years ago, streets of  3 and 4 storey tenements still stood- around a dozen streets in total- now all gone, with nature re-wilding in the way nature does best. Left to itself without any interference from humans. I find these places fascinating. How time can change things so drastically as I remember visiting these streets 30 odd years ago and hundreds of families living here. Same story with all the big Glasgow housing estates in post industrial Britain. Vast numbers of workers in factories and shipyards no longer needed. Smaller numbers  of gig economy workers taking their place instead throughout the city, usually highly visible newly arrived ethnic minorities getting fit by cycling everywhere on bikes- hundreds of them delivering square backpack boxes of fast food to fat westerners exercising less and less each year or only indoors, inside a gym. The American Dream transported abroad for all to share with a local line up of all the usual USA food and drink, drive through, outlets you can think of sitting at the bottom of this estate.... And in every other urban area, UK and world wide. No bike deliveries happening in this neighborhood though.  Looking north here.

 Another view of the same area, this time looking west. Next to a still operating bus stop and  bus route- the terminus is now situated in a open meadow...You couldn't make it up...

Proof that streets and tenements once stood here. The long abandoned tenement cluster of Ryedale Place, Pilton Road, Rayne Place and Sherwood Place. And a once busy school on the hilltop here, now only visible as a large flat  tarmac rectangle and some fast eroding concrete steps and walls leading up to it, half buried in long grass and bushes since the 1990s.

 Looking down Sherwood Place with Ryedale Place branching off uphill on the left. Areas like this always exert a powerful hold on my imagination. There's a long, half buried, very spooky after dark, fight of stairs in the woods near here. Since childhood wanderings I've explored  ruined mansions, ghost mining villages, abandoned tunnels, caves where generations of families lived, old hospitals, deserted asylums, underground bunkers etc and they all generate something in me that draws me back. And Glasgow is still filled with these unusual places- still undeveloped 30 years after they were pulled down or abandoned. And I love them all.

 They have almost finished the flood prevention work along the Garscadden Burn that's been ongoing for over a year now. This is the wooded boundary line between working class Drumchapel to the left  and upmarket Bearsden, to the right. Because they sit so close to each other they are often used by the Scottish media as a perfect  example of rich and poor, have and have not's, living side by side. The Garscadden Way runs up through these woods, skirting the edge of Drumchapel but as I'd done that section last year I decided to cross over into Bearsden instead as I'd not visited the nearby Colquhoun Park for at least 20 years. 

 A view taken from Knightswood Hill showing just how close they are together. The electricity pylon denotes the end of Drumchapel and a stone's throw away is the nearest house in leafy Bearsden on a slightly higher ridge but a huge gulf in income levels I'd imagine.

 One of the reasons I wanted to come over here is that I could see how attractive the autumn colours were from a distance with a nice mix of deciduous and evergreen trees. I know most districts in the Central Belt fairly well and Bearsden is no exception. Unlike Drumchapel however and other working class districts I've been in over the years, which change constantly, decade to decade, the posh areas of suburbia rarely change at all since the day they were built. Probably the reason why so many rebels, artists, performers, etc come from well heeled suburbia throughout the UK. They get a good education to express and promote themselves coherently, they usually have a family network of useful contacts to get places denied to others and the funds available to open any doors with help buying expensive start up equipment etc ... and it beats a 40 year career slogging it out in more traditional upmarket avenues like business, politics, banking,..... and so forth.... then they get out and get away... from a place that never changes.

  You know you are in an upmarket area when you can hardly see any houses. Bigger gardens, larger trees, plenty of space available. I suppose at this point it's as good a place as any to briefly mention UK MP's failing to survive on £82,000 pounds a year income and having to take second and third jobs to cope and make ends meet. Granted I do not live in London, I'm single, and live within my means in a modest house but I can get by very comfortably thank you on £10,000 pounds a year and can afford all the luxuries I need. I can even get by and have done on £5000 pounds a year total income and not grumble too much about it. If I was getting £82,000 pounds a year, even in London, I would be a millionaire fairly quickly with the money I save every week on that salary. Also, I've always been too knackered doing one physical 40 hours a week job to contemplate anything else other than food, rest, and sleep so these older three job guys can't be working hard enough in the first one, surely. What I really object to though is not people getting on in life, or having money and ambition/drive,  but with politician's in general thinking they are hard done by and lacking any sense of decency or shame.  Most of the ordinary citizens I know and am proud to live beside, if they were earning enough to live on comfortably, would not have the brass neck to routinely get caught out claiming extra  money from a variety of sources, simply because they would be far too embarrassed to do so. For instance- I would be deeply embarrassed if I could not live on £82,000 pounds a  year! I would be even more deeply embarrassed if I was also claiming taxpayers money for extra income- even if it was within the rules as my own sense of right and wrong moral code, and most ordinary citizens have inherent decency I've found, ( which I've witnessed many times in real life situations on the street) would not allow me to do that.

(And if I did do it, they, the authorities, would soon make sure I was severely punished for my heinous crimes.) I am aware in the world they live in... of top executives and banking big wigs rubbing shoulders in expensive restaurants.... who probably earn far more each year than they do and feel sorry for them in general terms at their beggarly plight .....  but asking the general public who survive on far less to see your obvious dilemma in having to scrape by on a miserly £82,000 pounds per annum... for a part time job..., while as a party they continually advise/lecture you on expected standards of good conduct and behavior as a society... is a lot to ask.

Anyway, I did enjoy my brief visit into Bearsden and Colquhoun Park, seen here. On old maps and in my 30 years ago memory bank a bare looking skating pond and an adjacent curling pond sat here along with a series of football and rugby pitches. This small pond, like most others in Glasgow and outlying areas, have benefited greatly from various re-wilding projects, with bull rushes, bushes, and long grass softening the once hard sided, vegetation free, edges. A big improvement.

Station Road runs from Bearsden Train Station past this park, then skirts the edge of Drumchapel to climb steeply towards Chesters Road. Past this point in the photograph, going left, it's a quiet minor route untroubled by many cars, servicing a cluster of large detached mansions and upmarket flats half buried in mixed woodlands. A road I often enjoyed year round observing the changing seasons and wildlife.... in a van or on foot. Possibly my favourite road in Bearsden.

 It's not changed at all and I still enjoyed it all these years later. To the left of the photograph the road climbs steeply upwards, through mature deciduous woodland heading away from Drumchapel and on into upper Bearsden.... What would I find there I wondered...?.         end of part one.