A church meadow

EAGLESHAM is now almost a southern suburb of Glasgow, in what is now East Renfrewshire, but it has had a long and interesting history for such a modest place.

It is on the northern edge of the moorland which lies between southern Renfrewshire and northern Ayrshire.

Part of this high moorland is now the site of Whitelee Wind Farm, the largest wind-energy installation in southern Scotland, with 140 turbines. There is a visitor centre associated with the farm.

When in the 12th century King David I partitioned Lowland Scotland into shires and parishes he allocated the land so treated to ‘noblemen’ who he had brought up with him from the Norman-English court in which he had spent his formative years.

Most of these men were of Norman origin, relations of those who had come over to England with William I – the Conqueror. One of them, Walter Fitzalan, was, however of Breton origin, and was the son of Alan Fitzflaad, steward to the earl of Shrewsbury. The family would have spoken a ‘Brittonic’ language, similar to modern Welsh, which was the common language of most of what is now western Britain, including south-west Scotland.

With a background in the administration of a large feudal country, David made Walter Fitzalan ‘High Steward’ of Scotland, and allocated him lands in what became Renfrewshire and Ayrshire, including the parish of Eaglesham.

He made his headquarters first at Renfrew and then in Paisley, and gave Eaglesham to his friend Robert de Montgomery.

The name ‘Eaglesham’ is derived from the Latin ‘ecclesia’ meaning a church, and ‘ham’ meaning a meadow or a village.

It may well be that there has been a place of Christian worship here since the Roman period; places with a long history of worship tend to develop a strong sense of peace, and this is certainly true of Eaglesham.

The present layout of the village in which the parish church is set dates from 1769 when it was laid out by the tenth Earl of Eglinton as a hand-loom weaving settlement. It is very unusually on an A-plan, with a central triangular village green. In 1791 a cotton-spinning mill was built at the top of the green, the yarn it produced being woven in the village.

A church was provided from the start, built in 1788-90, one of a number of centrally-planned Scottish churches of the period. It was originally octagonal in plan, and was very similar to the parish church of Dreghorn, near Irvine in north Ayrshire.

The Eaglesham church was, however, enlarged in the late 19th century.

Like the Dreghorn building it has an elegant classical steeple in a style fashionable in Scotland at the time.

The church is in a mounded graveyard (with some interesting tombstones, including one erected in memory of two Covenanters).

This is a village and a church which mean a great deal to me. I was brought up in Cathcart, on the main road between Glasgow and Eaglesham. My earliest memory of the village dates from the mid-1950s when I was fascinated by the church and its steeple. I still have a photograph of it taken on that occasion.

Later I often cycled out to Eaglesham of a summer’s evening; it was a lovely run – uphill most of the way there, but downhill on the way back.

By that time many of the older houses were empty, having been condemned as insanitary. Most have since been restored as the village was early recognised as worthy of conservation. Eaglesham has become a very desirable place to live.

The church is still its most distinguished feature; a lovely building in a lovely setting, well worth visiting.