Tir Na N-og

Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.   

J.W.Goethe, Italian Journey

The true fruit of travel is not in seeing other places, but rather, as a process of self-discovery, in returning and seeing one's home. I can recall as a child returning after a month long vacation in France and seeing the city of Glasgow as if for the very first time. As I got older, the time required to retrieve this same feeling became stretched and stretched. No more would a solitary month erase the conceptual constructs of my home city but a year, maybe even two, was now needed. Later, as my work took me abroad, I gradually spent more and more time out of Glasgow in other cities, other landscapes. Each time I returned to Glasgow I saw it in a different light, not entirely new it has to be said, but with a different glow, a different radiance. Not because the city had changed but because I had. Each time I came back, there was something noticeably more alive... more luminous... more 'aquiline'...

Some 11 foreign residencies later, I now see Glasgow, finally rid of those crass constructs of grey and gloom, (of Tennents and Tunnocks), as some sort of Shangri-la that has sadly passed most of its citizens by. But then, even paradise can look a little tame on the back of a 12-hour shift. And of course, there is the matter of familiarity, and of thinking that by virtue of birth one knows one's city. This, however, could not be further from the truth, as Hegel well knew:

Generally, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not known.

And then there is the promise of the exotic to contend with, what the Glasgow poet Hugh MacDonald called 'the admiration of distance'. To be sure, it's always nice to know sunny days in succession, a reputation Glasgow does not appear to have, but is it entirely necessary to fly 2000 miles to get it? MacDonald would have us believe (perhaps because it is true) that a trip 'doon the watter' to the Costa del Bute or Arran would suffice, as would the old Celtic saying 'Ta Tir na n-og ar chul an ti - tir alainn, trina cheile' [The land of eternal youth is just behind the house, a beautiful land, fluent within itself].

Glasgow's greatest attribute if you can call it that is its geography. The land itself (though hardly discernible the closer you get to the city's epicentre) is what makes Glasgow fundamentally. There is a real 'slowness' on Glasgow's fringe which is manifest in its hills, fells, lochs and moors. An essential slowness tinged with a sense of the remote. Places where one can 'gather one's self'. It is rare for large cities, as Glasgow is, to have such spaces so near. And Glasgow is surrounded by them. As Hugh Boyd Watt concluded in 1893 in an article entitled Notes on the Hills Around Glasgow:

In enumerating these hills [Kilpatrick Hills, Campsie Fells, Kilsyth Hills, Lanarkshire Hills, Renfrewshire Hills] I have described a rough and broken ellipse round Glasgow... None of them are beyond attainment on a half-day's outing... A whole day, however, is not misspent on these breezy and homely uplands...

The land of eternal youth is just behind the house...

From Queen's Park flagpole looking north-west across the city to the Campsie Fells (noticeably, the crooked shoulder of Dumgoyne) and the highland range beyond.

On top of Dumgoyne, looking north to Loch Lomond and the highland range.

 From the Loch Humphrey path on the Kilpatrick Braes, looking east to the city.

From Cochno Hill (in the Kilpatricks) looking south-east across Glasgow towards Tinto Hill in the hazy distance.

From the site of the old Roman fort at Bishopton looking north across the Clyde estuary to Dumbarton Rock, Carman Muir (to the left), the eastern portion of the Kilpatrick Hills (to the right), and Ben Lomond in the distance.

Harelaw Dam in the Renfrewshire Hills.

The back-road between Glassford and Chapelton, on the south-eastern fringe of Glasgow.

Looking north to the Campsie Fells (The Kilsyth Hills) from the back-road (Gain/Shankburn Road) between Cumbernauld and Coatbridge.