Sunday, June 8, 2008

New Lanark

Sandy, Chris and I are touring around Scotland and Ireland for the next two weeks with three of my four brothers and sisters: Carol, Jack and his wife Shirley, and Nola. The first photo here shows my sister Nola and Sandy with our driver and tour guide, Mark. (We arranged the tour through Back Roads Tours of London, which will create a custom itinerary, provide a guide and driver-- leaving the driving, on the wrong side of narrow roads, to them.) Sandy is holding a bottle of Irn Bru (Iron Brew), Scotland's own soft drink.

Our first day, Mark picked us up at the Glasgow airport. That ironically let us also see the ancestral village of our Gardner ancestors (my mother's maiden name). The village they lived in for several hundred years, Bulgley Renfrew, is now underneath the Glasgow airport, so not too much left to see.

We also had ancestors in Lanark between Glasgow and Edinburgh, so we drove from the airport through the Clyde Valley, to Lanark. We stopped and looked at it and the utopian industrial community of New Lanark. The picture shows my sister Nola, Sandy, me, my sister Carol, my brother Jack and his wife Shirley on the hill above New Lanark.

New Lanark was where one rather benign industrialist, Robert Owen, created a cotton spinning industry to harness the falls on the River Clyde, and also deliberately designed a community where the workers got paid fairly decently, got good community housing and where their kids got an education. It lasted from the 1780s to 1960, and has been restored as a world heritage site.

Here is a view of New Lanark as we walked down toward it from the ridge (and parking lot) above.

The next picture shows a building which housed the education and leisure facilities for the community. Kids got basic education, adults could have dancing classes, adult literacy, etc. The statue supposedly shows a girl of the era.

Just up the Clyde River from New Lanark are some falls which show the vertical drop in the river that provided the water power for the cotton mills. There is a very nice nature walk along the river up toward the falls, so those of us who were feeling least jet-lagged, Jack, Sandy and me took a one kilometer hike up along the river, which you can see in the next photo.


The next photo shows the Corra Linn Falls, the first and most spectacular of three falls on the Clyde above Lanark. We got just about that far and discovered that we were a bit too jet lagged ourselves to keep going, so we went back and had lunch in New Lanark's cafeteria with the others. Then we motored on the rest of the way along the Clyde toward Edinburgh.

1 comment:

hoolia goolia said...

Looks so awesome! Those falls are just gorgeous. I'm thinking of you guys on your trip!