Another glorious Sunday and a return to Lennoxtown to hit the railway path. Last week I had walked to Kirkintilloch and back. Today I planned to head in the other direction and reach the village of Strathblane four miles away. The walkable section of the route terminates here and I would have to do the return leg on foot as there is no direct bus back to Lennoxtown. Not to worry - I needed to put miles on the clock to increase my post-Covid fitness.
Lennoxtown is situated within the Parish of Campsie, within the County of Stirling. The town grew around the calico printing industry and another important process was nail making. The railway closed to passengers in 1951 but freight traffic continued until the mid 60s. Today there is no trace left of the station or goods yard and the traditional industries have vanished from the landscape. An infamous mental institution once stood on the edge of Lennoxtown and I have written about this elsewhere. The hospital was actually administered by Glasgow Corporation but deliberately sited in a rural environment outwith the city limits. The path initially tracked the Glazert Water through a pleasantly wooded valley and new housing stood on the fringes. It's hard to see a case ever being made for this backwater line's reopening but the tendency to erect residential developments alongside old railways must mean there's a ready-made army of naysayers, fuelled by nimbyism, ready to make their voices heard should any serious proposal be floated. Once the line diverged from the water, I entered flat green terrain at the foot of the Campsie Hills. It must have been a scenic run on the train back in the day and I strode past fields of lambs and admired the peaceful surroundings. Fortunately the trackbed escaped being farmed over and walkers can today enjoy this route, which also forms part of the 134-mile John Muir Way - a trail from coast to coast named after the Dunbar-born conservationist who was the founding father of the American national parks. It seemed as if the entire walk from here would be upon ground as flat as a pancake but an incongruous rocky mound called Dunglass appeared on the horizon. A volcanic plug, the 500-foot outcrop reportedly provides a great viewpoint but my mission today was to remain on level ground. Beyond Dunglass, the gradient began to drop and a shallow cutting led down to Strathblane. The station site is now occupied by a private property and gardens which meant the path took a right-angled turn towards the main street. The first passenger train called here in 1867 after the line was extended from the original terminus at Lennoxtown.
Even at the outset, the line was not expected to handle significant volumes of passenger traffic as - with the exception of Blanefield Print Works - the area was an agricultural one. Farm produce was anticipated as the main source of income, particularly milk. By 1882 the line had reached Aberfoyle but this involved running along a section of the Forth & Clyde Junction Railway - owned by a rival company. Such arrangements were by no means unknown but they must have created logistical issued until the network was grouped regionally then ultimately nationalised. The writing was on the wall for scantly-used rural lines in the immediate post-war era and the inability to compete with cheaper bus services saw many stations close, even before Beeching waded in with his size 10s a decade down the line. Usually the actual tracks survived for freight runs, probably partly due to the fact that permanently closing a railway involves a complex parliamentary process. But when a wholescale network reduction was planed in the 1960s, most lines that had already lost their passenger services were finally swept away. One sop was to introduce a bus replacement service that tracked the course of the railway as far as possible. Predictably, they fell by the wayside but a survivor was the bus that ran from Edinburgh to the border towns once served by high-speed trains - an arrangement that continued into the internet age. Somewhat bizarrely, you could purchase tickets on the rail booking websites for stations that had long since been bulldozed! Strathblane has just under 2000 residents and it's close enough to Glasgow to serve as a commuter base. I sought out the local Co-op for a cold drink before wandering back to Lennoxtown. What a pleasant little ramble!
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