Clyde

The River Clyde is the dominant physical feature of Glasgow and its environs, the largest urban concentration in Scotland, with almost two million people living in the city and satellite towns. Little of this immediate hinterland can be described as beautiful, with crisscrossing motorways and relentlessly grim housing estates dominating much of the landscape. However, there are pockets of interest, many related to the river itself or the industries which grew up from it.

West of the city is Paisley, where the distinctive cloth pattern gained its name, and the former shipbuilding towns of Port Glasgow, Greenock and Gourock. On the north bank of the Firth of Clyde the ancient Strathclyde capital of Dumbarton, and Helensburgh, birthplace of architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and television pioneer John Logie Baird.

Heading southeast out of Glasgow, the industrial landscape of the Clyde Valley eventually gives way to a far more attractive scenery of gorges and towering castles. Here lie the stoic town of Lanark, where eighteenth-century philanthropists built their model workers' community around the mills of New Lanark, and the spectacular Falls of Clyde, a mile upstream. Even further beyond, deep into the rolling countryside of South Lanarkshire where the Clyde is little more than a widening stream, the market town of Biggar with its unusual clutch of museums serves as a useful orientation point to the hill farming country of the Scottish Borders beyond.

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