IN 1816, landscape painter John Knox, travelled the 10 miles or so from Glasgow, to paint the Clyde from Faifley and Duntocher—two small settlements which were part of the parish of Old Kilpatrick. It was an early autumn scene, a rolling wooded hillside with a textile mill in the distance. It was pleasant, green and largely unoccupied. By the mid 1840s it was an entirely different picture.

THE life and times of the publisher, home-ruler, land reformer and radical, John Ferguson (1836-1906), were brought to life in a fascinating presentation by social historian Sean Thomas McDonagh, in Grace’s Irish Centre late last month.