County in Scotland
Dunbartonshire
Dunbartonshire launched the Queen Mary, built a Cutty Sark, gave the world television's inventor, and once ruled as capital of a British kingdom from a volcanic rock.
Key information
- County
- Dunbartonshire
- Nation
- Scotland
- Known for
- Clydebank shipbuilding, Dumbarton Rock, Loch Lomond's western shore, Helensburgh and Hill House
- What locals are called
- Clydebank folk are "Bankies"; Dumbarton's football fans are the "Sons of the Rock"
- Famous people
- John Logie Baird, Tobias Smollett, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (for Hill House), Walter Blackie (Hill House's first owner)
- Football clubs
- Dumbarton, Clydebank
About Dunbartonshire
The rock that was a kingdom's capital
Dumbarton Rock is a great black plug of volcanic basalt rising from the Clyde, and for centuries it was the stronghold of the Britons of Strathclyde. They called it Alt Clut, "the rock of the Clyde". The town's name comes from the Gaelic Dùn Bretann, "fort of the Britons". The kingdom's fortress fell to a Viking siege in 870, when Olaf and Ivar the Boneless are said to have starved it out and sailed off with captives to Dublin. In 1548 the five-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots was sent from here to France for safety, sailing out from beneath the rock. Tradition also has William Wallace held in Dumbarton Castle before being taken south to London. The rock was a military site for well over a thousand years, and you can still climb its steps to the twin peaks.
Where the biggest ships on Earth were born
Dunbartonshire's shipyards had a reputation far beyond Scotland. At Dumbarton, William Denny & Brothers finished the famous tea clipper Cutty Sark in 1869 after her first builders, Scott & Linton, ran into financial trouble. Denny also built the Denny Tank in 1883, a long water-filled test tank where ship models were tried out before the real thing was built. It is often described as the world's first commercial ship model testing tank. Then came Clydebank. John Brown & Company launched the great Cunarders, among them the Queen Mary in 1934, the Queen Elizabeth in 1938 and the QE2 in 1967. The battlecruiser HMS Hood, pride of the Royal Navy, was launched here in 1918. Clydebank was also home to the vast Singer sewing-machine factory at Kilbowie, which opened in 1884 and was once the biggest of its kind in the world. Its huge clock tower was a landmark for miles around.
The night Clydebank almost disappeared
On 13 and 14 March 1941, German bombers hit Clydebank in two nights of raids, the Clydebank Blitz. The town was a prime target because of its shipyards and munitions work. It is commonly said that only seven of its roughly 12,000 houses escaped damage. Hundreds of people died, and tens of thousands were left homeless, many fleeing into the surrounding hills and nearby towns. The town rebuilt, and the shipbuilding legacy lives on in local memory and in the tough humour of the Bankies.
Television, Mackintosh and a mystery bridge
Helensburgh, on the Clyde's northern shore, was the birthplace in 1888 of John Logie Baird, who would give the first public demonstration of television in London in 1926. Up the hill stands Hill House, built in 1902 to 1904 by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for the publisher Walter Blackie. Mackintosh designed almost everything inside, from the furniture to the colour schemes, and it is regarded as his domestic masterpiece. Then there is Overtoun Bridge near Milton, which has gained a strange reputation because of stories about dogs leaping from it. It sits in the grounds of the grand Overtoun House. The novelist Tobias Smollett, author of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn in the Vale of Leven.
Loch Lomond, whisky and the Sons of the Rock
The western shore of Loch Lomond belongs to Dunbartonshire, including the pretty village of Luss and the ground where "the bonnie, bonnie banks" of the famous song lie. The loch is the largest stretch of fresh water in Great Britain by surface area. Food and drink here means a dram. Auchentoshan distillery, on the edge of Clydebank, is known for triple distillation, which gives a lighter Lowland style than the double-distilled whiskies of most Scottish distilleries. Football runs deep too. Dumbarton FC, founded in 1872, are among Scotland's oldest clubs. They won the Scottish Cup in 1883 and were league champions in 1890-91, sharing the title with Rangers, and again in 1891-92. Their fans are the Sons of the Rock. The Gare Loch, meanwhile, is home to the Faslane naval base, the Royal Navy's Scottish submarine base.