Geology Reference
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south-east slope, Townsend's Stalk towers over the city, so there
need be no excuse for ignorance about the position of the ancient
Summerhill [ 19B ].” Townsend's Stalk was demolished in 1927, so
there's more excuse now.
The name of St. Rollox, however, had caught on in a big way.
There was the St. Rollox Cotton Mill, St. Rollox Engine Shed, Flint
Glass Works, Ironworks (two of them), Railway Works, Spring Van
and Lorry Works, Bottle and Flint Glass Works, Cooperage and
the St. Rollox Cooperative Society, with its warehouse on Lister
Street. Among Glasgow pubs at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, “Another quaint survivor was The St. Rollox Tavern, Castle
Street, where sheep's head broth was served in dining rooms richly
hung with old paintings and engravings [ 22 ].”
Strangely enough nobody seems to have attached the name
to a street, so after expanding over a great deal of territory it vir-
tually disappeared again. In The Industrial History of Glasgow ,
Hume considers that the most lasting monument, not just to St.
Rollox but to the entire Glasgow chemical industry, must be the
great mounds of alkali waste from the plant that were later grassed
and built over [ 21 ]. (A manager named J. MacTear pioneered the
reclamation of sulfur from such waste in the 1870's.) Hume
hasn't specified where those mounds are, however, which limits
their value as a monument! A dip in Pinkston Road, north of the
Broomhill, is still called 'Stinky Corner' or 'Stinky Ocean' with
good reason. There was some concern that the waste might have
been dumped on 'our' hilltop, in which case it might not be able to
take the stones; but exploratory probes by the contractors' earth-
movers found only good, dark clay.
In fact the plant's most lasting monument is what is not there,
because the Summerhill wasn't the only area to be reshaped by the
developers. The canal had already been carved into well within the
original Sighthill base, and a private branch was cut leading into
the St. Rollox works in 1836. But another form of transport was
coming to change the Broomhill still more.
In 1849 the Caledonian Railway completed a second tunnel
under the hill to their Buchanan Street terminal, with a ventila-
tion shaft going down from the hilltop to the midpoint. Both tun-
nels began with cuttings that went deep into the north side of
the Broomhill. Just when the south side of the hill was modified
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