After a long cold winter, I return to my shedquarters. On the desk sits a forlorn catalogue – Witness to Mortality, published in 1997 to coincide with an exhibition by Joseph McKenzie, a photographer famed for his iconic Gorbals Children. On the cover is a bleak landscape titled The New Lifestyle 2 (Red Road Flats Newly Opened). Shot in 1968, the black and white image shows a long, empty road, slick with rain, where a solitary vehicle drives towards the vanishing point. Centre frame, a black telegraph pole divides the image, beneath which a woman in a winter coat faces the camera. On the right, startling and mysterious in the fog are two tower blocks. For me, this one picture sums up Glasgow, a heartrending sign of things to come, but somehow not the future.
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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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