Gartnavel Hospital. Binghams Pond. Botanics. Maryhill. Claypits. Partick Thistle. The Long Walk. Part one.

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Gartnavel Hospital. Glasgow. Once you get to a certain age hospital visits become routine and I've bagged a fair collection of hospitals now. First with elderly parents and now myself. The top floors often have spectacular views over the city. Day or night. Like Heaven... only with more horizontal citizens, longer corridors, cleaner windows, and less medicational benefits I'd imagine. Gartnavel Hospital I like as I've not been detained in it yet for any length of time ( one can only hope that continues)  and I've always managed to escape back out again each time..... and it has an attractive local feature right beside it in the shape of Binghams Pond. A pleasant place to shuffle around in your pajamas and not too taxing.

 

 

This is it here with the hospital behind. Many decades ago it was a fashionable boating pond and larger than it is now but fashions change and the current pond, once bare sided, is now filled with vegetation and water fowl.

Two coots. Binghams Pond.

 Swan on nest. As it's hardly rained here for the past two months many city ponds are almost dry and the birds are leaving to find bigger bodies of water and compete for dwindling food stocks. We might be in a human made crisis but so are they at the moment. No magic money trees for them either. What will help, especially in a drought, is people leaving out some ground level water in a dish for birds, foxes etc and one in a more overgrown secluded shaded spot in the garden for hedgehogs, foxes, frogs, newts etc as I'd imagine they would be glad of it with normal sources of moisture rapidly running out. Found a large toad sitting within an empty paint tin in a neighbours garden just because it had some collected rain water still in it and it could crawl into it and rest submerged in the shade during the day. This kind of weather must hit all wild life really hard. We'll be lucky in 50 years time to have any left.

 

As it was a lovely day and it was only a routine check up for various minor problems I invited my friend Anne to join me as I had a cunning plan. Walking round the circular pond a church on a distant hill, seen above, is an obvious landmark feature and neither of us had been up to it..... so we did manage it this time.

Turned out to be perfectly ok but not as special as we'd hoped but things seen from a distance are often like that as your imagination as to what it might be is sometimes not as mundane as the reality. The plus side of coming up here though was it was a district neither of us had visited before. Kelvindale and Kelvinside. It's a well established upmarket area constructed during the Victorian expansion of the city and neither of us know anyone posh enough to live here. We had skirted the edges but not passed through the middle.

 

 We were heading to the Botanic Gardens, and normally we would take a bus there but on this occasion we were exploring a district that could give Bristol or Bath a run for their money with elegant streets and terraces. Victorian and Edwardian splendour at its finest. A quiet back street here.

 You know you are in a posh area when the street names are not metal plates stuck on lampposts or attached to buildings but carved individually and ornately on giant blocks of stone. A street name as a work of art. With what looks like a cornucopia, which I suppose is the Victorian version of a magic money tree... or at least a branch of one.

 

Elegant terrace near Great Western Road. 

 

It was a district with more than a few impressive mansions although these days, minus servants to clean all the rooms, larger buildings are often subdivided into flats, nursing homes, and similar establishments.
 

 

Built at a time when Glasgow was expanding and the West End was 'the' place to build a stylish house, away from the smoke, grime, and belching chimneys of the city centre and the east end districts. Most Industrial Revolution northern European cities have a posh west end and a deprived east end entirely due to the prevailing wind, where common sense places all the evil smelling factories and chimney stacks downwind and the better off areas upwind of any pollution.

 Variety is the spice of life however so we were soon in the hothouses of the Botanic Gardens. Beehive Ginger here, above. Having visited it before on several occasions we were just passing through. I had considered exploring the abandoned underground railway tunnels here for a few km but they were soundly meshed up with impenetrable entrances... so no joy. Although we both had torches, just in case, I think Anne was secretly relieved by that. As was I. It was too nice a day to be underground.

 

Glasgow's leafy West End. The wild River Kelvin.

 

Bridge into the Botanic Gardens over the River Kelvin.

Palm tree trunk. Botanic Gardens Hothouse.

 

Happy monkey. I'd half expected the tunnels to be blocked off so plan B was just to visit some new areas we hadn't explored before and weave a walk of great variety through different districts.

 

Passing through North Kelvin District.

 

And then down Maryhill Road.

 

To arrive at Partick Thistle F.C.

 Old entry gate prices.

 

Mural Wall. Former Player.

 Club Crest. The Scottish Thistle.

 

I was surprised to see it replicated on some of the period tenements around the ground. A nice feature.
 

 

As far as I know Rangers and Celtic don't have that.

 

The nearby Queens Cross Church. Although Charles Rennie Mackintosh is a world renowned Scottish architect, for me personally few of his buildings have an exterior 'wow' factor. Some of them are plain ugly to my eyes although they might be nice inside. This is a good example of that. When I visited Hill House in Helensburgh the outside of that building and the surrounding garden felt similarly sterile and unappealing and I was more drawn to the surrounding properties on the opposite side of the road. His wife Margaret is more to my taste and her elaborate Celtic goddess designs apparently influenced Gustav Klimt, as you can see if you look at her work then how much his earlier painting style evolved into his celebrated 'gold period' ( The Kiss etc) after he had viewed her exhibits and conjured up his own colour filled squared and rectangled interpretation of it.' 

 

Probably nicer inside, like all his buildings, but on this occasion we were on an outdoor quest for visual excellence and had a schedule to keep....

 

...To The Claypits. When they were building the Forth and Clyde canal and other canals across the UK they needed to scoop out pudding clay to waterproof and coat the dry canal bed and any basins where boats could rest up. Hundred year old waste ground and several abandoned hollows have been transformed into a modest park and nature facility in the last few years. These things do not come cheap though and one million plus pounds is a rough guess on my part from brief online research/curious digging. It may be even more. An alternative but equally truthful block message might read. "Humanity may possibly end up killing all wildlife." Same number of words.

 Seeing it during the height of summer the wild flowers were out in force here and they were much cheaper to install, either as planted seeds or natural wind sown introductions. Lupins.

Sloping wheel chair and disabled ramps zig zag up to the Forth and Clyde canal tow path and there is a new pedestrian bridge over to the other side that wasn't there before. The Claypits area has been extensively landscaped with several trails and a good viewing platform over this side of the city. We did see several wheelchair users/mobility scooter folk around as they would find it hard to access this area previously. 

June at its finest. A promised land of honey and sunlight.

University of Glasgow from the Claypits viewpoint.  With pigeon.

Park Circus Towers. With human.

St George's Cross and Garnethill District in Glasgow.

And the walk was only getting started.  " Shall we continue?"  I asked my fair lady.

"Lead on Gov'nor." She replied. " Tuppence a bag round these parts for my charms and company."

" That's a real bargain."  I agreed.