For almost a year now I’ve travelled by bus, car, underground and on foot, cataloguing the oddest corners of Glasgow. I’ve climbed barbed wire fences, walked along the edges of motorways, staggered up hills with my camera kit and sheltered from the rain in more cemeteries than I care to remember. I’ve walked around housing schemes, visited parks and shopping malls, peed on sacred ground, in fields and in woods. I’ve set up my camera in places where murders and suicides have been committed, stood in disused buildings and at least one castle, followed the course of rivers and railway lines and watched twenty-storey buildings collapse before my eyes. I’ve looked at boulders, statues and signposts with the same curiosity, incomprehension and wonder.

It occurs to me I’m making a strange kind of road movie and I haven’t quite run out of road yet. I’ve eight more trips to make before I reach my target – the magic number of 33. But road movies demand a sidekick, so today I take my husband along. Just as well he’s an expert map-reader since I refuse to buy into sat-nav for this project, preferring the same method Harry Bell used when he set out on his journeys in the 1980s in order to test his theory of Glasgow’s Secret Geometry. He talks of the hidden, now invisible tracks across the city. After this trip I think I know where he’s coming from.

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Cradle of the Stewarts says the sign on the A8. I’m surrounded by patches of fenced-off land primed for retail development, no doubt designed to avoid Glasgow’s crippling business rates, reputed to be the world’s seventh most expensive. At Renfrewshire’s border, a spit from the M8 motorway and Glasgow International Airport, things are looking up. According to its website, Braehead Shopping Centre is the Scottish Retail Excellence Awards Shopping Destination of the Year 2007-8.

It’s not just Braehead, the centre of south Glasgow’s retail universe. There’s the satellites – IKEA, the Audi Showroom, InStyle Furniture, Porcelanosa – occupying the same artless acres of plate glass, corrugated steel and breezeblock sheds. It’s a non-architecture, but whose plans and elevations I’m sure are sweated over by well-meaning practitioners. Just what is it about these places that I find so depressing?
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While growing up it seemed to me that Paisley was more enlightened than its bigger, brasher neighbour. That, and its proximity to Pollok made it my playground. As a kid, on Saturday mornings I’d catch the red bus from Paisley Road West to the East Lane Ice Rink. Less than a decade later, as an art student I’d pose at punk gigs in the town’s Bungalow Bar or go to movies such as Ken Russell’s The Devils, banned by Glasgow Corporation, whose heavy-handed censorship resulted in an exodus of the city’s cinemagoers. Glasgow’s loss was Paisley Odeon’s gain.

On this rare sunny evening I make the journey along Paisley Road West, passing the bungalows of Cardonald and Crookston with their four-figure street numbers, reminiscent of LA suburbs in the paling sunlight. Arriving, I get thrown off course by the town’s one-way system and, navigating my way to Abbey Close, I notice the street signs: Cotton Street, Gauze Street, Dyer’s Wynd, Silk Street – names preserving Paisley’s manufacturing past in textiles and thread. Here fortunes were woven.
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My trip to Castlemilk feels like visiting a distant relative: familiar, friendly but not something you choose to do often. Several of my relatives live – or used to live in the scheme, one of Glasgow’s four major peripheral post-WW2 sprawls designed for the fleeing slum-dwellers of the 1950s and 60s, built on the city’s greenbelt in response to a desperate need for housing. The word adequate comes to mind - if having a flush toilet in your house can be called adequate.

Beyond suburbia, the schemes bypassed the sandstone villas, semis, bungalows and ‘four in a block’ cottages closer to the city centre. These were the ‘bought’ houses, unobtainable to the majority of Glasgow’s citizens, more used to hiding from the rent man chapping the doors of privately-owned hovels than applying for mortgages. Somehow Rent Man, like Insurance Man and Provicheck-Woman always arrived at night, usually Friday night, the universal payday, when women redeemed their pledges in the pawn shop while their men escaped to the pub or the (then) illegal bookies.
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I’m in King Street framing up the clock tower at the back of Rutherglen Old Parish Church when Tommy sidles up, an Olympus compact in his hand, eyeing up my tripod and camera. You’re a photographer? It’s 7 o’clock on a Friday night and I’m here because the Glasgow weather doesn’t stick to timetables. Not really, I reply as I take the shot. Tommy, short, wiry, probably in his late 50s, shifts from foot to foot, eager for more information than I’m prepared to give him.

In this narrow street it’s hard to catch the last of this rare light. I’m on a mission to locate three of Harry Bell’s sites – the aforementioned church, the Gallowflats Mound and Carmyle Fords. But only if I’m quick. However Tommy seems like a man with all the time in the world, shuffling behind me as I chase another angle a few yards away. I still prefer to use real film, he tells me, not the digital stuff. Normally I’m a paragon of patience when it comes to curious bystanders, but I fear Tommy’s pushing his luck.
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During a recent walk from Camphill Earthwork to the Necropolis with the esteemed Dr Ronnie Scott, we paused at the vast gapsite off Cathcart Road/Aikenhead Road to watch the foundations being laid for what’s known as the M74 completion. The road will plough through several communities in the city’s south east – Dalmarnock, Rutherglen, Polmadie and Govanhill – before joining the M8 at Kingston Bridge. Like its predecessor, the M77, the M74 extension is controversial. A public inquiry, started in 2003 and published in 2005, recommended against its construction, yet despite protests, the road is going ahead and is due for completion in 2011.

According to the archive of eco-action, when protests raged against the building of the M77 through Pollok Estate, situated only 50 metres from the road, in the housing scheme of Corkerhill, car ownership was recorded as the lowest in Europe. The archive also notes that one in five children in the Pollok and Corkerhill areas suffer from asthma. The M77 protests became one of the national news stories of the 1990s. But then, Pollok has always been a hotbed of civil unrest. The poll tax protests of the 1980s and the Pollok Free State of the 1990s may be distant memories now, but their histories endure.
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Eight minutes, Google Earth tells me it would take from my house. To my shame it takes me two days to reach Linn Park to locate another of Harry Bell’s PSAs, the site of the old Cathcart Castle. On day one I get lost – ironic since this project relies heavily on map reading and one’s ability to find places. Happily there’s an upside to this since I stumbled on the Court Knowe, situated on the opposite side of Old Castle Road from Linn Park. The road, said to have been the original castle moat, gives some indication of its scale. In the end though, do I really care about buildings I can’t see? What am I supposed to conclude from these so-called ancient sites anyway?
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X marks the spot. The phrase originates from the early days of press photography where the scene of a crime was marked with the letter X. So when I look up Cathkin Braes on Harry Bell’s Glasgow Network of Aligned Sites, I’m intrigued to find a large X crossing the site, situated – it’s claimed – on the thirteenth hole of the Cathkin Braes golf course.

One line of the X passes through the Camphill Earthwork from Mains Castle and motte in the south-east to the Cochno Stone in the north-west. The other goes from the Craw Stane in the south-west stretching (by my eye) imperfectly north-east to the Carmyle Fords. Whether these lines can be considered leys is doubtful, having so few sites attached to them, but judging by its position the Cathkin Braes was certainly a strategic site for our ancestors.
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