Lamington, Windgate house and the Deil's Barn Door
An excerpt from Walking in Clydesdale by Paul Lamarra
By the Way
Lamington is a pretty village - a hamlet really - and it was planned that way. Lord Lamington, a Victorian improver had designed for him a village of typical cottages with gardens fringed with white picket fences and had a quaint canopy of stone and slate for the village wellhead.
The only note of incongruity is the village Kirk, which is an austere grey stone box. Robert Burns attended a service there and inscribed on the window, "as cauld a wind ever blew, a cauld kirk an in't but few, as cauld a minister e'er spak, ye's a be het e'er I come back". Burns' sentiments are not difficult to understand for the church also sits on an exposed knowe, which catches the wind blowing up the Clyde valley. Burns may not have found the church or the minister warm but it was welcome shelter in 1715 for 200 retreating Jacobites.
The Kirk is plain except for an ornate ancient doorway that survives from the original Norman church. The doorway is closed off and half buried but it is reasonable to assume that through this door passed, Marion Braidfute, wife of William Wallace, as she is Lamington's most famous daughter. Leaving Lamington it is clear that Lord Lamington's desire for order did not limit itself to the village for he also landscaped the hillside with yew and rhododendron and damned its burns.
From Lord Lamington's park the route crosses unremarkable open hillside. Ahead is a narrow steep sided pass, which isn't immediately obvious. Once through the pass you emerge in the Cowgill glen and a different world of fat pudding like hills. Once there was a whole community living here. A temporary village of wooden huts accommodated the men who built the Cowgill and Coulter dams. The settlement included a school, a mission house, a reading room and a grocery store.
The reservoir road is the link between the pass and the track that climbs over the Cowgill Rig. It is from this narrow spur of land that you will get your first glimpse of Culter Fell and the jumble of peaks that surround it.
It is a steep decent to the Cowgill Reservoir and from there it is a short detour from the path to Windgate house. Windgate is now a ruin but its thick stone walls turning into a distinctive barrel-roofed byre and the internal steps that once led to an upper accommodation chamber mark this out as a bastle house. Usually bastle houses were built by tenant farmers to protect their livestock and family from marauding reivers. However this one is in an unlikely and probably unsustainable location so it may have been built by a privacy seeking laird of Lamington.
From this cool and sunless spot it is uphill towards the Deil's Barn Door. Out in the open again an indistinct path leads to Hardrig Head. The track, known as the Peat Road, because it was used by those harvesting peat from the moors, leads back to Lamington.
The Route
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