Clyde River Piers

on Apr 1, 2024

Lord of the Isles heading up the River Clyde with Dumbarton Rock in the distance With the exception of the Broomielaw and Bridge Wharf, photographs of pleasure steamers at the piers on the River Clyde are quite rare. In latter years, the usual stopping places were the piers at Partick, Govan, Renfrew, Bowling, and, for a brief period, Dumbarton. This article provides some background on the piers and the photographs I have of them. In the early years of steamboat traffic on the river, a journey might begin at a ferry point where the passengers would be rowed out to the passing steamboat by the ferryman. Common points on the river where there were ferries were at Govan; at the mouth of the Kelvin; at the “Water Neb,” the mouth of the Cart at Renfrew; at Dunglass point; and at the West Ferry crossing to Dumbarton. Boarding or disembarking a steamboat from or onto an open rowing ferry-boat...

Renfrew Ferry

on Jul 10, 2017

Marlin Ford, about five miles down the Clyde from the center of Glasgow allowed people and livestock to wade across the river when the tide was low. For those who had more urgent business or were unwilling to get their feet wet, there was also a ferry and the rights ferry were granted to the burgh of Renfrew from the time of the charter making Renfrew a Royal Burgh in 1614. The land on both sides of the river was part of Renfrewshire. The land to the south of the ferry formed King’s Inch and in 1760, the tobacco lord, Alexander Spiers acquire the ground on which he built his Elderslie Estate. It was Spier’s son, Archibald, who approached the Renfrew Town Council with a plan to re-site the ferry about half a mile downstream at the outflow of the Pudzeoch burn. Public access through the estate to the original ferry inn would be curtailed and the estate would furnish a new ferry boat,...