Kilsyth Circuit

I often pick a former industrial town and see if I can build a heritage trail on the digital maps. Sometimes a ready-made route exists but it's usually possible to stitch your own ideas into a viable outing. I hadn't set foot in Kilsyth before but I'd seen evidence of old railway lines when walking the Forth & Clyde Canal which passes close to the town. I also vaguely knew of an former hunting estate now functioning as a public amenity. I pulled up OpenStreetMap and worked out a circuit just short of six miles that began at the Colzium Estate and followed an old mineral railway towards a nature reserve before doubling back along more sections of trackbed. Sounded like a good day out and I had a lovely Sunday afternoon for it.

Kilsyth sits on the southern flank of Stirlingshire. The River Kelvin - which rises on moorland to the east of the town - forms the boundary with the County of Dumbarton. The Kilsyth Hills - a continuation of the Campsie Fells - form a scenic backdrop to the north. A major battle took place in the vicinity of nearby Banton Loch back in 1645 but I will relate that tale towards the end of the post. The settlement grew around the weaving industry but it was the arrival of quarrying (lime and sandstone) and mining (coal and ironstone) that brought the biggest influx of people. The population now hovers around 10,000 and the town now serves as a commuter base as well as hosting light industry. The pits have now been closed for nearly 60 years. Kilsyth is close to the M80 and it took just 25 minutes for me to reach the edge of town where the entrance to Colzium Lennox Estate is situated. It made sense to start here and I wanted to take advantage of the sunshine to photograph the mansion house. The forecast was actually excellent for the whole afternoon, but nothing is guaranteed in Scotland. The estate is obviously a popular place for locals to take a stroll on a nice day and I had to park on the verge of the main drive. A short uphill walk took me across a bridge and past the entrance to Colzium Glen. This would make a nice wander on its own but I had other plans for today. I did however step on to the glen path to view the magnificent icehouse - apparently dating from around 1680! Built into the steep banking, a set of stairs led down to the gated entrance. I had previously assumed icehouses were a Victorian invention but they were in fact introduced to Britain in the 1660s. No doubt their numbers proliferated in the 19th century due to the sheer number of large country houses built during this period. Several estates could easily in be close proximity to one another and the competitive nature of the time meant an icehouse was an essential piece of kit for any budding squire. The Colzium cold store is considered to be a rare and near perfect example of its type. It consists of a rectangular vaulted chamber constructed in stone with an entrance door and passage on the north side. There is an access hatch in the roof to enable ice to be lowered into the chamber. The floor is paved with stone slabs and drains into the nearby burn. Along one side is a small game pit for storing meat until it became ready for eating. The icehouse was painstakingly excavated in 1977 and considerable repairs undertaken to restore it to tip-top condition. Various species of bat have been known to roost here.

I then retraced my steps and headed over to the big house. Construction began in 1783 and major alterations made in 1861. The architectural style is a mix of the Scottish vernacular and the more modern renaissance mode. The Edmonstone family of Duntreath took possession of the estate after the previous occupants (the Livingstons) forfeited their property as a result of supporting the Jacobite cause. The Edmonstones moved their family seat back to its original location in the 1930s and Colzium House became derelict. It was bought by William MacKay Lennox - the town clerk of Kilsyth - who gifted the mansion and surrounding parkland to the burgh upon his retiral in 1937. It served as a youth hostel and many children were evacuated to Colzium during WW2 to escape heavy bombing around Glasgow. Large parts of the house were pulled down in the late 1940s due to the presence of dry rot. The original building was demolished, leaving a courtyard surrounded by the additions created by the Edmonstones in 1861. Today's Colzium House serves as a venue for weddings, functions and conferences. A small local history museum is contained within. Limited public viewing is available but the venue is currently closed due to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the grounds are open and I had a look around with my camera in hand. An elderly local couple confirmed the correct pronunciation was Coll-Zee-Um and I read that initial construction of the house was aided by the use of stone from the largely-demolished Colzium Castle, which stood 100 yards to the north. Once a large L-plan Tower House built in the late sixteenth century to replace an earlier motte-and-bailey fortification, the castle was pulled down in 1703 and only a fragment of wall remains today, supporting the end of a cottage. The Livingston family fled to Italy in the wake of the failed 1715 Jacobite uprising and - curiously - this is where the Young Pretender ended up after he launched a campaign 30 years later - and sadly lost. Not much to see of the old castle but Colzium Walled Garden was a different story entirely. The half-acre enclosure was completed by 1790 and the cavity walling created a microclimate that could be up to six degrees warmer than the surrounding landscape, enabling the normal growing seasons to be extended by a considerable margin.

Now an ornamental layout containing over 4000 plants - including rare species of snowdrops and many dwarf conifers - the garden has many secluded areas with ample bench seating. A lovely place to while away an hour or two on a warm day. I only had time for a quick look around and a brief rest but I was very impressed with the place. I would definitely make use of this space if I were local! A few paperbacks were scattered around on the seating and a stickered message from the "book fairies" invited folk to take a copy and return the publication when finished for someone else to enjoy. I love this sort of thing and I assumed it was tied in with World Book Day which had occurred a couple of weeks previously. The books had a fancy bow-tie across the cover but a better idea might have been a plastic jacket as several of the novels I examined had clearly taken a soaking. But what a nice touch! The garden would have provided fruit and vegetables for the big house and flowers would also have been cultivated. A market garden later operated from the walled compound and the local council took control in 1967. After spotting several clumps of exotic snowdrops, I moved on - noting the scant remains of Colzium Castle - before hooking up with an old drover's route named Take Ma Doon Road. It does indeed bring travellers down to the town market square but I branched off and took the trackbed of an old mineral railway. Kilsyth was once served by a main line (more of that soon) and a network of pit and quarry lines criss-crossed the area. The route I found myself on was signed as Neilston Walk - following the path of a railway constructed in the 1860s to carry coal and ironstone from local pits down to the canal connection at Tweechar. Small pug engines hauled the wagons which was a massive improvement over the days of horse traction upon rough roads. The main engineering feature on this line was a stone viaduct across the gorge of the Garrel Burn. I contented myself with a photo showing a glimpse of the masonry piers in the steep wooded gully, taken from behind a low wall. I did hop over to assess the climb down to the burn but it looked tricky and I decided not to risk the scramble, which may well have resulted in muddy trousers. Neilston Walk - known locally as the High Line - was roughly a mile and half along embankments and shallow cuttings, punctuated by short stretches of modern housing. I eventually emerged on the main Glasgow Road and crossed into a nature reserve.

Drumbeck Marsh was formerly dominated by industrial activity. It has now been fully landscaped with areas of grassland, reed beds and ponds among the open countryside. This provides a stark contrast to the days when coke and coal waste abounded and railway tracks ran in all directions. The area is It is now home to a variety of birds, including lapwing, skylark, and the water rail. Typically, I didn't see any of those but there were plenty of ducks swimming and the path was well patronised by the public. Work is ongoing to restore the stream to its natural course and provide new public walking routes. I passed a junction where a railway once split off to serve the massive Haugh Cokeworks. This area was now under redevelopment and I stuck to the River Kelvin on another section of old mineral trackbed. Eventually I met the B802 at Auchinstarry Loch where the path terminated, although I spotted a rusting parapet of an old bridge. I turned back towards the town centre and the distant hills were prominent on the skyline. I cut through the pedestrianised shopping zone for a change of scenery and emerged back on the A803 which runs through the top half of the town. The railway reached Kilsyth by way of two distinct railway developments that approached the town from either end and effectively formed an east-west corridor between Falkirk and Glasgow. Today's main line of a similar description runs along the opposite side of the Forth & Clyde Canal. When rationalisation took place in the 1960s, there was little prospect of two "duplicate" routes being allowed to continue trading. The Kilsyth option never stood a chance as the through connection had already been downgraded to freight only status - with occasional driver training duties taking place. Passenger trains from Kilsyth to Glasgow (the Kelvin Valley line) ceased in 1951 while services to Bonnybridge in the Falkirk direction had been scrapped as far back as 1935. In both cases, increased competition from motor buses was the culprit. By 1966, Kilsyth was a railway desert. The town actually had two stations - a remnant of the lines being built by different companies. No trace of either remains today and you would be hard pressed to find any evidence of railway infrastructure. You can however walk the old trackbed eastwards, parallel to the main road but tucked out of sight behind a mix of old and new housing. This dovetailed nicely with my circuit and ensured a good proportion of the walk covered old railway ground.

The term "duplicate line" crops up frequently with regard to the post-war railway closures. When Dr Beeching swung his axe, it often fell upon a route that had a twin following a roughly parallel course. Describing the victim as a duplicate was in many ways a neat PR trick. After all, you don't need two lines shadowing each other, do you? Well, that depends on the communities served on each branch. If there are large towns present on each line, you are obviously leaving many people bereft of a rail service if you snip off one side. There must be dozens of railways running side by side in London. They even line up together in neat coloured strips on the iconic tube map! Okay, Harry Beck's world-famous diagram was never intended to accurately convey scale or exact orientation but you get my point. As ever, we now rue the mass butchery of the national network through 21st-century eyes when rail travel is now actively promoted as a green solution and roads become ever more congested. Those lines that have found a way back have been runaway successes, eg the Borders Railway and the reconnection of Alloa. Back in the 60s, train tracks were yesterday's technology and many backwater routes no doubt relied upon ancient wheezing steam locomotives. Car ownership - although fashionable - was nowhere near its future apex and cruising along the newly-built yet lightly used motorways or even trundling the B-roads by bus would have been regarded as perfectly acceptable, if not better alternatives to rail. The walkable section of trackbed ended across from the entrance to Colzium Estate thereby bringing my tour to a neat end. It had been a highly enjoyable exploration of the town's history. But hang on a minute, didn't I mention something about a battle? Oh yes, Kilsyth played host to one of Scotland's bloodiest conflicts which is strangely almost forgotten today. The estate is bordered by Loch Banton and I knew there was a memorial stone on the water's edge. My wearying legs persuaded me to hop into the car and find a parking spot as close as possible to the loch. A short stroll through a patch of woodland brought me to the shore and I could see the marker standing ahead of me. The Battle of Kilsyth was fought in 1645 - almost exactly 100 years before Culloden - and the death toll was twice as high. Why isn't it well known these days? Probably because it was an internal struggle and lacked the Scotland-England (or anyone else) dynamic of Culloden, although that's clearly an oversimplification of the Jacobite rising.

The Kilsyth showdown was part of the Wars of Three Kingdoms - an intertwined series of conflicts that took place between 1639 and 1653 in England, Scotland and Ireland – separate kingdoms which were ruled by the same monarch - Charles the First. The belligerents mainly quarrelled over governance and religion. The English Civil War is the best known example of these flashpoints which of course resulted in the execution of Charles. The issue of whether power should reside with parliament or the monarch was central to them all. The seeds of the Kilsyth conflict were sown when the Marquis of Montrose led his royalist army into the Scottish lowlands. They were high in confidence, having secured five consecutive victories without reply over the Covenanters during the previous 12 months. The Covenanter Government of Scotland was firmly allied with the English Parliament but the string of setbacks left just a single intact state force in Scotland, under the command of the experienced professional soldier William Baillie. Meanwhile, the politicians had vacated Edinburgh for the safety of Stirling as Montrose tightened his grip. Despite being outnumbered three to two, the royalists record a sixth straight victory and suffered only light losses. On the other hand, Baillie's army was decimated - although he himself managed to escape. Montrose found himself the undisputed master of Scotland but events elsewhere conspired to make this reign a short one. The English royalists lost the key Battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire, leaving their cause in shreds. Montrose was finally defeated in the Battle of Philiphaugh near Selkirk and was subsequently hanged in Edinburgh. Another slice of Scottish history learned by virtue of a walk prompting further research. It was time to head home but I haven't yet mentioned the whitewashed castle I spotted just before I reached Kilsyth on the way in. The signage told me that Glenskirlie Castle hosted weddings and other events and I simply assumed it was a repurposed Stirlingshire stately home. I couldn't have been more wrong. Google threw up a most surprising result.

Glenskirlie in fact became the first Scottish castle to be constructed in the 21st century - opening its doors in 2007. I didn't even know castle building was still a thing! Nor am I sure whether any others have followed in its wake. Fifteen individually themed bedrooms – including two luxurious 100 square metre suites – have been named after roses with the floral theme carried on throughout the castle’s interior design features. Glenskirlie is situated just outside the village of Banknock and is owned by a family who also run the adjacent restaurant. The honeymoon suites feature four poster beds, sunken baths, separate dressing rooms and walk-in wardrobes, along with lounge and dining areas. The project is being marketed as a hotel/venue but it certainly looks worthy of its castle billing. Mind you, the original press release stated that bed & breakfast was available from £145 per night. Even if these rates were available today, I doubt I'd be checking in anytime soon. Might call in for lunch though.