Milngavie

At the Start of the Way

A granite obelisk stands in the pedestrianised centre of Milngavie, and it marks the official start of the West Highland Way — ninety-six miles of footpath north to Fort William. A tourist information point sits about fifty yards away. Most of the people gathered around the obelisk on a given morning are about to walk to the Highlands; the rest are doing their shopping.

The name is pronounced "mull-GUY", which catches out most visitors. The town sits on the Allander Water at the north-western edge of Greater Glasgow, about six miles from the city and a frequent train ride from Queen Street. The station is the terminus of the North Clyde Line and stands opposite the Lillie Art Gallery on Station Road.

Mill, Shops and the Old Core

Gavin's Mill is one of the oldest buildings in the town, a former watermill on the Allander now run as a community social enterprise. It houses an ethical shop selling fair-trade food, Scottish produce and zero-waste goods, and a vegetarian café with home baking and fair-trade coffee. Fresh bakery deliveries arrive on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and the mill keeps a calendar of talks, workshops and music.

The town centre was pedestrianised from 1974 and mixes Victorian shopfronts and Arts-and-Crafts frontages with later units. The Cross Keys, one of Milngavie's oldest surviving buildings, predates 1800 and anchors the old village core.

Moorland, Castles and Reservoirs

Mugdock Country Park begins more or less where the town ends — 260 hectares of loch, moor and woodland straddling East Dunbartonshire and Stirlingshire, reachable on foot. There are walking and cycling routes around Mugdock Loch and the Allander Water, and the ruins of two castles: Mugdock Castle, a fourteenth-century Graham stronghold, and Craigend Castle, a Gothic mansion that later housed a zoo. The park has adventure play, a ranger service, a garden centre and cafés.

North of the town, the Milngavie Reservoir holds up to 548 million gallons of Loch Katrine water on its way to Glasgow. Queen Victoria opened the waterworks in 1859. The landscaped Victorian embankments draw walkers, as do the Auld Wives' Lifts, a natural rock formation on Craigmaddie Muir.

Art and Industrial Memory

The Lillie Art Gallery, opposite the station, is free to enter and grew from the legacy of Robert Lillie, a local banker and artist who died in 1949. It has held paintings, prints, sculpture and ceramics for more than sixty years.

Milngavie grew from a New Kilpatrick milling village recorded around 1600 as "Millgay". Paper mills and bleach works ran on the Allander from the 1760s, and the railway's arrival in the 1860s brought wealthy Glaswegians who built stone villas around Tannoch Loch. In the 1930s a siding near the town tested the George Bennie Railplane, "a Jules Verne-esque silver cylinder with a large propeller" suspended above the track. The venture went bankrupt in 1937.

A Quiet Town Looking North

It is largely a commuter and retirement town now, quiet and comfortable. In 2008 some residents ran a campaign for Milngavie to host the 2020 Olympics. It came to nothing, but the obelisk still sends a steady stream of walkers north each morning, rucksacks on, heading for Fort William before the shops have opened.