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.