The Orry runs straight up the middle of the village: a triangular green about a third of a mile long, planted with trees and split down the centre by the Eaglesham Burn. Everything here is arranged around it. Two ranges of houses climb the hillside on either side — Montgomery Street to the south, Polnoon Street to the north — and the green rises between them, wide enough that the two sides of Eaglesham feel like separate addresses. The word Orry comes from the Scots *aurie*, meaning area, which is about as plain a name as a piece of common land can have.
This layout is not accidental. In 1769 the tenth Earl of Eglinton began laying out a planned village around the green, offering tacks on 900-year leases; his successor finished the job. The result was designated Scotland's first conservation village in August 1960, and the parish still holds around sixty listed buildings. You are walking through a piece of eighteenth-century town planning that has largely stayed put.
The Eglinton Arms Hotel stands on Gilmour Street, the long-established public house of the village, its original north-west section a listed building. The name belongs to the Montgomerie Earls of Eglinton, who founded Eaglesham and owned it for seven centuries. Further along Gilmour Street is Polnoon Lodge, an early-eighteenth-century hunting lodge built by the ninth Earl — later a temperance hotel, then a boarding house, then restored as housing for the elderly, which won it a Civic Trust Award in 1971. One house in Cheapside Street is a miniature replica of it, once lived in by the estate factor.
The parish church, at the top of Montgomery Street, was completed in 1790 to a design by Robert McLachlane and began life as a small octagonal building before it was extended. Inside is a memorial to Robert Lockhart and Gabriel Thomson, two Covenanters executed on 1 May 1685. Down on Polnoon Street, St Bridget's was built in 1857 for the Irish workers who came to the cotton mill, and holds a large canvas of the Deposition of Christ.
The mill itself is gone. A water-powered cotton-spinning works went up in 1791 and employed around two hundred at its peak; it burned and was rebuilt more than once before a fire in 1876 finished it for good. When it was first built it cut into Motte Hill, the flat-topped mound beside the burn where local assemblies were once held.
South of the village the ground rises into Eaglesham Moor and Whitelee Forest, and the moor now carries the largest onshore wind farm in the country — 215 turbines across fifty-five square kilometres, with a free visitor centre, a cafe and roughly 130 kilometres of trails for walking and cycling. It is an easy drive from the green.
Glasgow is eight or nine miles north; Newton Mearns and East Kilbride are closer, and since the A726 opened in 2005 the through-traffic no longer comes past the door.
It was a field just outside here, at Floors Farm, that Rudolf Hess landed by parachute one night in May 1941, having mistaken the place for somewhere else entirely. A local ploughman, David McLean, walked out and helped the injured airman to his feet.