Hidden Environmental Histories of the River Clyde

Orcas at Greenock

“I saw crowds of people looking excited and then all of a sudden a male Orca, came up to breathe. I walked along the esplanade about an hour as the pod slowly made their way out to deeper waters."

https://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/2018/04/orca-spend-a-day-in-the-clyde/

ARRIVING/RUSHING/ STRONGLY FLOWING

A Poem By Eilidh Northridhe

The sound of water rushing. The slow sound of water flowing forcefully, slip stream to a current, the soft clap as it wraps itself in great handfuls around a rock. The gentle rhythm calls on the muscles at the base of your skull to unclench. The sound sinks through you like a breath.

And then

In a motion which feels like waking from a deep sleep, you realise the sound is different. Its not the sound of water at all. It is the sound of a motorway, of cars rushing by.

When I arrived in Glasgow, it took me a while to find the river Clyde. I traced the path on google maps from my newly rented flat towards the thick strip of blue. I tried to follow the Kelvin, but I found myself in a Lidl car park, blocked from the water by tall walls of hedgerow. I retraced my steps. Next, I found myself at a tangle of motorway which blocked me from the river. I made way precariously between fast traffic towards a pedestrian overpass. Beneath me flew a sea of rushing cars, late to something. I stepped over a series of dates imprinted in the footpath’s stone:

1845: Pointhouse Shipyard Founded by Thomas B Sneath.

 1858: First dry dock opens at Meadowside shipyard.

A woman walks like a slant through the rain

Like she’s late to something.

Her fingers fidget around the cotton strap of her bag

As she walks towards

The river

On its face the river wears a mirror image, the trapped sky

Which moves as rustling leaves do

I reached the river Clyde.

Deeply banked below the roads, the Clyde itself seemed inaccessible and unaware of the surrounding hum of industry. She* seemed uninterested, an adverse camber of silver sloping off into the distance. She seemed not to mind what we humans got up to on her banks.

But I know that’s not strictly true.

* When I think of water, I think of a soft light on a loch sitting as sharp and strong as iron, cupped by mountains: and all the features of femininity which words will never properly pronounce.

Standing by the Clyde for the first time, I thought about how much has happened on those banks,

Let’s start at the beginning

I wonder whether the water might somehow remember any of that.

The very beginning

I want to explain what and how the water can remember

Except with water there is no beginning

I realise I don’t know quite what I am trying to say.

So where do we start?

Perhaps the Clyde doesn’t know either.

I decide to do some research, and I find some interesting facts online

The Clyde starts its life in South Lanarkshire.

The Clyde meanders first east then northwest for around 109 miles. A lot happens to her until she releases herself and all her stories into the great mouth of the sea, the Firth of Clyde.

My best friend told me that at its beginning, the Clyde starts out as a trickle.

Her family passed it in the car, and her mum pointed out the window and laughed and said, “look, it’s the river Clyde”.

Lets move on. You miss a lot when you start looking for the beginning.

REMEMBERING/EVAPORATING/CLEANSING

When I was wee, I used to be afraid that if I remembered something too many times, the memory would wear thin from use, and I would be left one day with

nothing

You wouldn’t know it, but the Clyde has had a lot of work done over the years.

I find out that the Clyde has been thinned, fattened, shallowed, deepened.

1919 Harland and Wolff acquire Meadowside and Pointhouse Shipyards.

I find out words like scour and dredging, and I find out about the Elderslie Rock which was blown up, a hazard to ships.

1940: Cruiser struck by bomb at Yorkhill Basin.

What does the river know of history?

Stories are imprinted on the rocks at the riverbed, in letters people cant read

Water wears those letters down and tries to wash them clean

Cleaning a wound

But through washing, the water has learned the words, and she whispers the stories back to herself through ebb and flow

We know that human bodies hold memories

Is water haunted, falling from the sky to streams and back again, retracing its steps, searching through the memories

Memory in motion, weeping itself through tides.

Of things which move, we ask: where do you come from and where are you going?

Where did you come from?

its an absurd question for water to answer

Its like asking where a breath begins, or a thought

Where did you go?

River overflowed into oceans and fed into millions of other plans

.

Perhaps its time to talk about ships

On another visit to the Clyde, I find the Tall Ship

I’m thrilled to find not only that the Tall Ship is a Museum but it is free entry, so I go.

Aboard the Tall Ship a child incessantly rings the boat’s bell

To the displeasure of everyone.

The Tall Ship, called the Glenlee, spent over 5000 days at sea.

Where did you go?

On google maps I noticed an area of Glasgow by the Clyde marked out called “Plantation”. I do a quick search, and sure enough, google reports that the area was named after the sugar and cotton plantations in the West Indies owned by the wealthy Glasgow merchant John Mair in the 18th century

I find out about the people who lived in Plantation in Glasgow, the comings and goings of communities that lived in the tenement buildings there, until they were demolished in the 1900s

I wonder if the families who lived there ever dipped their toes in the Clyde or used it to do their washing.

Now Plantation is all motorway, the ebb and flow of traffic

I find nothing on the webpage about slavery

as if the sea between Scotland and the West Indies was enough to wash off any connection beyond a name.

The Clyde is thought to be named for the Celtic goddess and patron of the river, Clōta

Clōta’s name is derived from words meaning the strongly flowing one' or 'the holy cleanser'.

Another possible root for the name is the Brittonic word Clywwd, which means ‘loudly’

I don’t know how much noise the river itself makes even when you’re standing right by it. All I can hear is that incessant bell.

And the cars on the road.

I wonder if all of us were quiet, what the river might have to say?

1962: Pointhouse shipyard closes 

What is the point of bookkeeping history? If half of the truth is to be washed away

The sea has carried so much in her lifetime

I imagine she tries to carry stories from shore to shore on her currents

like a message in a bottle.

MESSAGE/HOLDING/SPEAKING LOUDLY

On my last visit to the Clyde

The sun looks bright on the river

It hangs so close to the water that its reflective glare bleeds from the horizon line.

It’s the evening

I’m on my way to a dance class in merchant city. I don’t like dancing much, but its one way to make friends in a new city when you work from home.

The river moves in strong choppy strokes of black and white

I’m astonished by how glossy it looks, like onyx

Slip streams rush by the bank, as if late to something

I’m walking along Broomie law, past the squiggly bridge

I count the dirty things moored by the riverbank

An upside-down beer can

An empty 35cl of glens

A takeaway coffee cup

Empty vessels, not sure where to go next

All of a sudden, the sky releases a deep sigh of heavy rain

The woman stops short of the riverbank

From her bag she pulls an empty wine bottle, recorked, with a note carefully tucked inside

The sun is lying low on the Clyde, and she is standing by a strangely shaped bridge. This seems as good a spot as any to release her message to the clutches of the water

She pauses for a moment, feeling suddenly foolish, like a child

But she has something to say, and she’s far from home, and she wants to think someone can hear her

It has to mean something, to do something. So she lets the bottle go.

It floats gently a while downstream

She turns and walks away, embarrassed, and retraces her steps

She turns away a moment before the bottle gets stuck behind a pontoon in a rubbish heap.

What do messages mean when they don’t reach anyone?

The water knows many stories which we can’t hear

That faint sound of rushing, it could be a car or

It could be something whispering, far away.

Timber Ponds

These upstanding posts at Port Glasgow are remnants of timber ponds, stores for timber for 18th Century Shipbuilding. photographs from  @blueleafnature 

Scottish Maritime Museum

Denny Ship Model Tank Experiment. William Denny and Bros built Blockade Runners and sold them to the Confederacy during the the American Civil War in the 1800s.

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_60666_smxx.pdf

www. scottishmaritimemuseum.org 

Image - By Lairich Rig, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13850083

Lang Dyke

The River Clyde was deepened in the 1800s & it was Tobacco Lairds who called for deepening. It meant that the  #Clyde  was made navigable up to the Broomielaw. At low tide, you can still see the “Lang Dyke”, a jetty built for scouring a deeper river channel

Ship Graveyard

At Bowling Harbour, there is a Ship Graveyard. Abandoned boats have been coming to rest here since 1945, when the harbour started to be used for scrapping, This photo from  @blueleafnature 

shows wreaks still tethered to moorings. Find out more  https://canmore.org.uk/site/102460/unknown-bowling-harbour-river-clyde… 

New Shot Island

The River Clyde was narrowed and deepened and widened again. In 2014, the world’s oldest Diving bell barge, built in 1854, was found at New Shot island ship graveyard. It’s a relic of a time when divers descended to cut at the stubbornest rocks in the name of navigation. More here: https://scapetrust.org/newshot-island-boat-graveyard/

Whyte Inch Island

Did you know about the lost islands of the  #RiverClyde  ? James Watt's survey map of the River Clyde from 1736 shows some of the seven islands below Govan on the Clyde - Water Inch, Whyte Inch, Buck Inch, King’s Inch, Ron, Newshot and Bad Inch Read more:  https://bit.ly/39ev7lC 

Elder Park

At our show and tell event on the 24th of September,  @AinsleyHamil  will share her music and talk about the  #Govan  community research that inspired it

Govan Graving Docks

Artists Iwona Zając and Eugenia Tynna, used the typographic style of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders posters and quoted from archives and testimonies on the remnants of Govan Graving Docks. “Born in Govan” hits home

Glasgow Garden Festival

In 1988, the Glasgow Garden Festival was held on the banks of the River Clyde.

Plantation Quay Pontoon

a name thought to link to sugar and cotton plantations in the West Indies, given that the owner was plantation owner John Robertson

Polmadie Burn

Pollution from former industries is one aspect of the hidden environmental histories of the River Clyde. Hexavalent chromium pollution from the former J&J White’s Chrome Works has been in the news again this year, where the buried chrome waste has leached into the nearby Polmadie Burn, giving it a luminous green colour

David Livingstone Birthplace

Blantyre, the birthplace of famous Scottish explorer-missionary David Livingstone (1813-1873). After training as a medic and a missionary.

Orchard District

There was once an Orchard District on the River Clyde

This clipping from 1860 notes it extending from Lanark to Hamilton- “from the vantage grounds lying above it, is like that of a vast landscape garden” It’s inspiring to know! Could we have urban orchards again?

Stonebyres Power Station

Stonebyres power station was part of the UK’s first Hydroelectric power scheme. It began powering homes in 1927 & now makes electricity for 17,000.

Its power comes from  #StonebyresFalls  & a tilted weir regulating water flow. The power station was restored in 2020  #NetZero 

Limefield Falls

https://river-life.org.uk/our-falls-a-new-community-project-for-polbeth/