Dougalston in Scotland’s Western Central Belt: a Glasgow Tobacco Lord’s designed parkland landscape?

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century designed landscapes in the Western Central Belt of Scotland are relatively under-represented in the literature, despite this being an area with many estates that were purchased as country seats by wealthy Glasgow merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the wealthiest of those merchants was the Tobacco Lord John Glassford who purchased Dougalston Estate to the north of Glasgow in 1767. The long-standing conventional wisdom is that Glassford transformed the area surrounding the estate mansion into a designed parkland landscape of water bodies, woodlands, rides, and walks. We use a range of evidence — old maps, mapping of ha-has and trees, reconstruction of rides and driveways, dendrochronology, analysis of several designed landscape buildings, and archival research — to conclude that John Glassford was very probably responsible for the start of the switch from formal to parkland designed landscape, but that the full ‘project’ was completed by his son and grandson. The timing of Thomas White Senior’s involvement in Scottish landscape design means that it seems clear that he could not have been responsible for designing the Dougalston designed landscape and the issue of who was responsible for planning the Dougalston designed landscape remains to be resolved. Two important wider issues are related to the work we present here. Firstly, it must be remembered that the wealth that Glassford and his descendants poured into the parkland designed landscape was derived, at least initially and perhaps subsequently, by inheritance, from slavery. And secondly, in terms of modern-day planning matters, our work shows that the key elements of a designed landscape from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be reconstructed in some detail using our multi-disciplinary approach.