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<\/a><\/p>\nI did a lot of growing up here. Throughout my teens, into my 20s and beyond I would visit \u2013 alone, with friends, with boyfriends and eventually my husband. Like a ghost, in some unnameable, vaguely spiritual way, I claimed possession over the place, as the place has done with me.<\/p>\n
Sadly, in recent times I\u2019ve been put off visiting, in spite of the banner\u2019s boast \u2013 Not so in other quarters. A few years ago I was dismayed to find Pollok House had transferred ownership from the city council to The National Trust for Scotland and soon after an admission charge, currently \u00a38, was imposed. Moreover, several of my favourite pictures \u2013 El Greco\u2019s Lady in a Fur Wrap<\/em> and Blake\u2019s Adam Naming the Animals<\/em>, the Goya prints \u2013 went missing for a time. They\u2019ve since been reinstalled, but I wouldn\u2019t know. I refuse to pay for what my 10-year-old self had come to believe was ‘mine’.<\/p>\n For months I\u2019ve watched the corporate sleight-of-hand drag out as the city council attempted to lease part of the estate\u2019s North Wood to a private concern called Go Ape. Their proposal, to install a quasi-assault course and charge the public \u00a320 to swing from trees in full view of the Burrell Collection met with fierce dissent from the locals when they discovered that the sole notice for a planning application was posted on a lamppost outside the park boundary.<\/p>\n Today the weather\u2019s capricious, broody, great dark clouds to match my mood. My mission: to locate the site of Nether Pollok Castle, another of Harry Bell\u2019s PSAs. In fact there are two others in the vicinity \u2013 the misnamed \u2018Burrell\u2019 ringwork in the North Wood, (Burrell had no association with the estate until the 1980s), and a tumulus on Pollok golf course. Using the Google Earth plot points supplied by geomancer, Grahame Gardner, and my trusty OS map, I set out.<\/p>\n I arrive at the car park beside the White Cart Water, river of my Pollok childhood so clean now that you can catch salmon and trout instead of dead supermarket trolleys and Weil\u2019s disease. The Cart flows in front of Pollok House, the fine 18th century seat of the Maxwell family, owners of the 361 acres since the mid-thirteenth century.<\/p>\n These days anyone with enough cash and aspiration can play the aristo for a day. During a recent walk near Pollok House, I felt like an intruder as I watched a wedding party in full swing, the guests lining up to be photographed in the knot garden, no doubt a strategy implemented by the National Trust to drum up revenue. That, and the recent addition of murder mystery evenings. How many of the guests are aware, I wonder, of the real-life murder that took place here when the body of 23-year-old Diane McInally was discovered in bushes close to the Burrell Museum in October 1991, first in a series of unsolved murders of seven Glasgow prostitutes?<\/p>\n It\u2019s the height of the season but thankfully its midweek so the park\u2019s not overrun with visitors. But the skies look sulky and grey. I set out with my stills camera, hedging my bets, snapping the obvious landmarks \u2013 the house, the river, the lovely stone bridge. Crossing, I climb a metal railing, scramble down a slope and into a meadow, heading for the likeliest spot. On one side of me, the Cart, on the other, a clump of trees looking decidedly like a mound. Under its canopy I spot a pair of young Asian-Scots guys, bikes abandoned, spliffs billowing. A few yards on, by the riverbank, two young women share a blanket, drinking, reading magazines and texting, oblivious to their surroundings. Passing them, I locate a set of foundations, only to find them disappointingly recent. Circling the area, I prowl for signs of something older. As it turns out there are, but sadly I\u2019m no expert in ancient castle sites. Nothing I see can be trusted.<\/p>\n I\u2019m certain Harry Bell would be interested to learn that a group of archaeologists from Glasgow University and the Glasgow Archaeological Society recently (June 2008) discovered what they claim is the city\u2019s oldest surviving road, said to date from Iron Age dwelling. In a Herald<\/a> article by Gerry Braiden – I find a mention of a second ringwork in Pollok Estate, in the North Wood, not the one listed in my OS map or on the Glasgow Network of Aligned Sites<\/em> on Google Earth. I\u2019m going to have to check.<\/p>\n Trudging back to retrieve my video camera, I\u2019m caught by the sight of a trio of men playing golf on the course opposite Pollok House, said to be another of Harry Bell\u2019s sites, a tumulus. But how can I be sure? The entire area is dotted with tree-topped mounds and bumps and who\u2019s to say which, if any, has the greater significance? All along the Barrhead Road you can find similar lumps in the ground. Having made hundreds of journeys over decades on the 21 bus from Pollok to the city centre, I can vouch for their existence, but how many are recent inventions?<\/p>\n More compelling is the assertion that since Pollok Estate was private land it was \u2018protected from developers\u2019 thus preserving these ancient roads, as if to suggest the grounds remained intact for 700 years. I beg to differ. Virtually every corner of the Maxwell estate was developed to some extent from the mid-13th century until the mid-20th, from house and road building to drainage, fencing and artificial landscaping \u2013 how else did all those rhododendrons get there? Those infrastructural changes and the more recent presence of \u2018private\u2019 clubs \u2013 tennis, golf, rugby, riding, even allotments \u2013 don\u2019t detract too noticeably from the character of the estate, in fact, each demonstrates the perpetual shape-shifting of the land. Nothing remains intact. Nothing in this city ever does.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nEuropean Country Park of the Year<\/em>. Bad enough, I thought, when the city decided to build a museum to house the artistic spoils of industrialist, William Burrell, on my favourite patch of open ground. Eventually I succumbed to the building, a glass and stone construction discreetly tucked in a wooded corner, although the surrounding land remains compromised by a commercial car park and the obligatory children\u2019s play area, as if to admit the museum\u2019s not distraction enough. At least, I console myself \u2013 at the time of writing – admission is still free.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n