DERIVING FROM the Gaelic glas chu meaning ‘blue-green hollow’ Glasgow is a city surrounded by hills. Nestled somewhere between highlands and uplands, and carved out by the passage of glaciers some 15000 years ago, Glasgow is a city enveloped by ancient residue. To the west and the north there are the stratovolcanic ranges of the Kilpatrick Hills and the Campsie Fells; to the south there are the Kilmacolm Hills, the Renfrewshire Hills, the wonderful Glennifer Braes.

These hills combine to describe one of the Glasgow’s greatest assets - its dynamic panorama. Surprisingly, this never seems to feature in any of the carefully groomed guidebooks that continually present the city as little more than a collection of pubs and shops, defunct shipyards and grey foreboding skies.

For the once heavily industrialised metropolis, it is only relatively recently that Glasgow, in moving away from heavy industry, has wheeched off its perma-stoor veil and allowed from this ring of hills views of itself, and of the furthers beyond.

Not only can we see the city, but on a crisp dry day, it is possible to see the jagged peaks of the Highland range, the gentle contours of the Cowall Peninsula and the western isles, and the abrupt adumbration of Ailsa Craig wallowing in the Atlantic. Such prospectuses render Glasgow more than just a city. They reveal, in fact, an unbroken connection between city and country, and between land and sea.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colours of the dawn and dusk.

Navarre Scott Momaday In the Presence of the Sun

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; but when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

Wallace Stevens Of the Surface of Things

'Earth Turn', west over Knightswood, (from the 19th floor of Lawers Tower in late February). The cleft of the Cowall Peninsula in the Atlantic (about 60km away) is quite clearly visible in the backlit distance. Hills are not the only places to proffer grand prospectuses. Glasgow's many drumlins and high rises mean that a view is never far away.

CLOUDS OVER GLASGOW





Then, what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?
I love clouds... drifting clouds... there.... over there...
marvellous clouds.

Charles Baudelaire

On a cold quiet day in March, a Rorschachian moment with some fair-weather cumulus humilis. From atop one of Glasgow's great vantage points - Mugdock reservoir in Milngavie - one can almost see forever.

(Top) The cumulonimbus, that great feature of a Glasgow sky, makes itself known from the top of Peel Glen Road, Drumchapel, at the site of what used to be the old Roman fort, looking north towards Windyhill.

Hills and clouds go hand in hand. Nephologically speaking, Glasgow's skyscape, privy to the movements of an Atlantic front and to the static contours of an undulating landscape, is pretty exciting.

With a little due attention we can learn a lot from watching the sky. Sadly though, few of us actually do it. John Ruskin, a man whose word-paintings of cloud-filled days occupy large swathes of his journals, speaks freely of clouds in his epic Modern Painters, especially in the chapter Of the Open Sky:

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

Look up, look down, look all around. The world is everywhere.

Some wispy cirrus, a good example of a mackerel sky, above the Kilpatrick Braes.

CLOUDS

Clouds

they hang in the air

like whole countries

there before me

an unwritten atlas of the skies

Stratus - Cirrus - Cumulus

continents floating

on oceans of air

An enormous cumulonimbus still forming over Loch Lomond. From afar, these giant beauties appear quite calm and gentle. Being under one is another story entirely.

From atop Cochno Hill some altocumulus floccus over Glasgow.

Looking west from Lawers Tower, Knightswood, a curtain (shelf cloud) cumulonimbus draws over the day, but not before some crepuscular rays can perform some kind of diurnal swan song.

Greenside Reservoir. The crisp well-defined head on this cumulus congestus shows that it is still very much in the process of forming. These clouds grow rapidly on sunit days with the upward convection of warm air.

THE START OF AN ATLAS


Auchineden

a high land Eden

a Scottish Oukaimeden

for the start of an Atlas

'Mountains that flow'.

This view looks north to Loch Lomond and the Highland range from Auchineden Hill on the eastern rim of the Kilpatricks.

This was the hill that started it all, when I decided one clear blue late February morning to 'get on my bike' so to speak. As a boy I had done the 20km cycle to Queen's View (the car park beneath Auchineden) several times. Those legs were, last time I looked, and beneath all that hair, still working. On the back of this beautiful day there were two others venturing into the Campsies opposite and Mugdock Country Park beneath to the south. After these three days there was no looking back. The hills and this wondrous late winter clarity had turned me. The next six months were spent ecstatically exploring. It was only then that I realised the true nature of what Glasgow actually was, a city that flowed, at times quite seamlessly, into a high land of unending wonder.

Looking south to the city of Glasgow, with Mugdock and Milngavie somewhere in the mid distance.

Looking west to the Campsies on a sparklingly clear day in late February. Dumgoyne is on the left below the slightly higher Earl's Seat with Slackdhu on the right. Another angle from the back of these two mammaries can be seen elsewhere on the site. Auchineden, aka The Whangie, is one of the Kilpatrick's more idiosyncratic hills featuring as it does a strange geological formation that lends it its name. The deformity in question, a deep Caesarian cleft in the hill's side, is apparently the production, in a bygone epoch, of some extraordinary terrene convulsion. Local legend tells a different story, a story of the Devil who was travelling north to appear at a Highland witches black mass. In anticipation of all that pallid, cavorting flesh, the Devil lashed its tail in the region of Auchineden thus fashioning the whangie fissure. Consequently, some refer to it as The Devil's Staircase.

AN ELEGY TO COMPLEXITY

Looking north to the Dome of Duncolm. This, the highest hill in the Kilpatricks at roughly 350 feet, is a splenid vantage point for the Highlands beyond, the Campsie Fells to the east, the city to the south, and the coast to the west.

Living as I do in Warsaw smack bang in the middle of the Great European Plain I know what flatness feels like. As much as I enjoy a stable Mazovian climate, I miss the hills that Glasgow (whether in the city or around it) has to offer (and all that fickle weather to boot). There is a certain variation, a certain complexity that hills bring to a landscape (and the mindscape), a complexity that is absent with flat un-undulating land. The following pictures, call it an elegy to complexity, represent only a few of the hills around Glasgow.



Small and unassuming Saucelhill, behind Paisley, offers wonderful views in all directions but particularly north over Paisley and its many fine old buildings to the Kilpatrick Braes and the Campsie Fells beyond.



Looking south over Craigend Muir from the spout of Ballagan, with the plug of Dunblane on the far left of the picture and Mugdock Reservoir barely visible on the right. The city is in the hazy distance.

Ballagan Glen, managed by the Scottish Wildlife Trust, is a small but beautiful reserve carved by the Ballagan Burn which cascades down a series of waterfalls. Heath, grassland, wet boulders, cliff faces, steep slopes with wet flushes and mixed woodland, collectively support a remarkable diversity of plants and animals. As a great fissure in the Campsie Fells Ballagan Glen offers the possibility to read into the various exposed strata of rock and shale and travel back in time. It also, as the other photo above illustrates, gives us exceptional views of Craigend Muir and the plug of Dunblane below.

The walls of Mugdock Castle are covered in May and June with the fairy foxglove. Mugdock offers excellent views over Glasgow and beyond.




Neilston Pad is another hill of attitude not altitude. Its little conifer mohawk makes it an unmistakeable landmark from all around.




From the 16th green at Windyhill Golf Course up at Baljaffray.




From the Cathkin Braes looking north-west. The five tower blocks in the centre of the picture are (were) Mitchelhill Flats, amongst the highest residential blocks (along with Red Road in Springburn) in Europe. They were demolished in 2005. Red Road flats will be demolished between 2009-2015 and it is expected that Glasgow's count of approximately 167 remaining tower blocks of 12 stories or more will be reduced to around 120 within the next decade.




Taken from the top of Castlemilk Road, looking north. On the left, lamposted, are the twin towers of Petershill Court in Parkhead (scheduled for demolition). Behind stand Red Road flats and others in Springburn.




From Dechmont Hill above Cambuslang and Gilbertfield Castle (there's a picture of this in another entry) looking north-west, Dumgoyne and the Campsies (just right of the smoke) barely visible in the background. The Kilpatricks are behind the smoke and to the left. Dechmont Hill is smack bang in the middle of an MOD firing range, so if you see any red flags waving...

The wavy hill-line of the Arochar Apls in the distance as seen through the Herculean pillars of Dumgoyach (on the left) and Dumgoyne (eking out on the right). This picture was taken in June from the Campsie Dene trail (accessed in Blanefield) which follows the old waterworks route up to Killearn and further beyond to Loch Katrine.

Above Port Glasgow looking across the Firth of Clyde towards Helensburgh, Kilcreggan and 'doon the watter' to the rolling hills of the Cowal Peninsula.



Glen Fruin up above Helensburgh on the way round to Loch Lomond.

CAR PARKS IN THE SKY







Here, we're looking east-south over the Kelvin Valley towards Bar Hill in the distance. This is the Crow Road leading from Lennoxtown to Fintry through Campsie Glen.

Moving inland from the river to the car (bicycle) park at Glennifer Braes behind Paisley, the body of water you see is Stanely Reservoir with a wonderful half-submerged castle in its midst. Looking north north-east, the Campsies in the background with the Kilpatricks petering out on the back left of the picture.

HILL STUDY

Dumgoyne, for anyone who has ever lived in Glasgow (or indeed within Dumgoyne's magnetic reach), is a landmark of few equals. It inscribes itself into the minds of all those around it. It most probably affected a young George Buchanan too who attended a school in neighbouring Killearn before being packed off to Paris in 1520 at the age of 14. Not particluarly high Dumgoyne is however, in its complex dissymetry and its apparent cornerstone location at the north-western point of the Campsie Fells, an idiosycratic icon. It oversees Glasgow (Glasgow consequently entranced by it) as it does the Highland range. It stands opposite the solitary plug of Dumgoyach, and a little further west, Auchineden and the Kilpatrick range. These are hills with attitude not altitude, and hold within their very bones moments of great complexity. I have heard Dumgoyne referred to as many things; perhaps though, when you familiarise yourself with it over a period of years, when you come to know it (not just by scaling it), any description of it seems trite and unsatisfactory. Maybe we should just leave it as it is. It is its own poetry in action. These pictures can certainly offer an inkling of its majesty, but again, here, it's not about the subject, it's about the process, the angle, the seeing and the feeing.

From the West Highland Way.




From Dumgoyach.




From the road to Killearn.




From the West Highland Way (2).




From Auchineden (looking east).




From Drymen.




From the kitchen sink.




From the summit! (looking north to the highland range).




From the summit once more (looking south to the city and beyond to the lowlands).




From Blanefield Road.




From Craigallian Loch.

If you can somehow escape the Cardonald housing scheme in the foreground you can perhaps make out Dumgoyne's awkward silhouette in the back centre of the picture. This was taken from the turret of Crookston Castle on a fickle day in May. To the left are the Kilpatricks on the very western edge of which is Carneddans Wood opposite Dumgoyne. On the right are the Campsies. Crookston Castle sitting on Crookston mound is just one of several extant forts in Glasgow that offer excellent panorama in all directions.

Climbing over the stile behind us, coming from Blanefield Road, one is greeted with an 'opening up' of Scotland like never before. Right ahead are the plugs of the wooded Dumgoyach and the bald Dumgoyne. Just as the Pillars of Hercules bridging the Gibraltar Straits open up to the vast space of the Atlantic so too do these two pillars open up the West Highland Way and the Highland range

From Queen's Park Flagpole.




From Dumbrock Loch.

Windyhill Golf Club in Baljaffray isn't called 'windyhill' for nothing. The back nine especially afford wonderful views over the Campsie Fells and the city of Glasgow equally. This is the fifteenth tee, and so far it's been all uphill. I often used to sit here and get my breath back and enjoy the sight, not least because that was where my ball (as if drawn by the magnetic pull of Dumgoyne) invariably ended up - out of bounds on the left!

The Parallax View


angled
there is a view of seeing something from every conceivable viewpoint
the flow
of totality
associated with appreciating something from every aspect
in every light
in every season
with every feeling

EARTH TURN

There are no sunrises

no sunsets

Just incalescent earth turns

and planetary pirouettes.