Glasgow - A very long time ago
The earliest records of Glasgow are of a maritime order. Down among the alluvial clay of the banks of the Clyde, ancient canoes, or " dug-out " boats, have from time to time been discovered. How long it is since these were deposited it is not easy to say, but very great changes must have taken place on the face of the country since then. Hugh Miller says : " Where the city of Glasgow now stands, three ancient boats one of which is in the Antiquarian Museum, Edinburgh, and another in the Andersonian Museum( it fell into decline through lack of funding, and when pressure on space increased with the formation of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College in 1887, the major Zoological and Ethnological Collections were given to the Hunterian Museum and the Andersonian Museum closed) have been dug up since the year 1781 ; the last not many years ago. One of the number was found a full quarter of a mile from the Clyde, and about twenty-six feet above its level at high water. It reposed, too, not on a laminated silt, such as the river now deposits, but on a pure sea sand." " It therefore appears," says Mr Robert Chambers, in his ingenious work on " Raised Beaches," "that we have scarcely an alternative to the supposition that when these vessels foundered and were deposited where in modern times they have been found, the Firth of Clyde was a sea several miles wide at Glasgow, covering the site of the lower districts of the city, and receiving the waters of the river not lower than Bothwell Bridge." " I may add," continues Hugh Miller, " that the Glasgow boat in the Antiquarian Museum is such a rude canoe hollowed out of a single trunk as may be seen in use among such of the Polynesian islands as lie most out of the reach of civilisation and that in another of these boats, the first discovered, there was found a beautifully polished hatchet of dark green stone an unequivocal indication that they belonged to the Stone Period."
The inference drawn generally is that the change of level of much of the coast-line of Scotland took place within the human period, and possibly just before historic times. That it was before the period of the Roman occupation, there is no room to doubt, from the traces of Roman remains on the low-lying land.
No one can look on these relics of our ancestors without being impressed with the amazing development of the art of shipbuilding, whose home has been so long upon the Clyde.
Tradition survives in a shadowy form connecting Glasgow with a settlement of Druids in the misty past, many years before St Mungo was born, telling of sacrifices that were wont to be offered on the hill where now stands the Necropolis. The Drygait is said to have been the Druids' gait, and here is supposed to have been the site of their dwelling-places. In the Saxon tongue the word Dry is the equivalent for a priest or holy man. In the Celtic it is Druidh. The tradition will find ready belief, as many will testify from personal knowledge how accurate is the title.
Tradition also connects the Druids with an old grove near the church of the Blackfriars.
The Romans of necessity must have been about the vicinity of Glasgow, for it lies near the track of the Wall of Antoninus. Like the real gentlemen they were, they left some coin behind. In Fossil Moss, a leather bag containing about two hundred silver Roman coins was found.
An old Roman road from Carluke is supposed to have entered Glasgow by Bellshill, Tollcross, East Duke Street, and the Drygait, crossing the Molendinar Burn, and continuing by Dobbies' Loan.
About the end of the fourth century the sylvan beauty of the place, and the crystal purity of the Molendinar and its overshadowing trees, attracted the notice of the famous St Ninian, the earliest native Scottish missionary, for here he built a sacred retreat for himself, sometime before he founded the church of Whithorn, in Galloway, which is looked upon as the first Christian Kirk of Scotland.
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