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Mall's Mire Burn (Hampden East - culvert outfall)

Hampden Stadium, Mount Florida, City of Glasgow (Renfrewshire).

This is probably only of minor historical interest.

A culvert outfall c. 1853, on the line of the Mall's Mire Burn (now lost, possibly re-routed when Hampden Stadium was constructed in 1903, and redeveloped 2014-15). The culvert outlall is shown on the earliest OS map appearing close to the watershed with the White Cart.

Given shallowness of the marsh and burn (prior to the construction of the first stadium) and the limited catchment area, it seems likely nothing survived and the early culvert discharging into a drainage ditch was probably grubbed up and the water flow absorbed into the local surface water drainage.

Alternative Names: None recorded.

Notes: The source of Polmadie Burn lies south of Rutherglen, and its tributary Mall's Mire Burn rises a little to the east of Cathcart Kirk. "Mall" [also Moll or Molly] used to be a familiar Scotch synonym for Mary, and tradition has it that Queen Mary on her flight" from Langside had great difficulty in bringing her horse through the muddy lanes near this burn, hence Mall's Mire. The derivation is doubtful. [Glasgow Rivers and Streams]

Maolsmeur, otherwise Millksmyre, now Mallsmire, the low bald brow of the marsh, or the low-lying marsh, or the fork, or the servile stream of the river, between the Cart and the Clyde, below it ... the valley or glen, once a branch of the frith, now the bed of Polmadie Burn, Maulsmyre or Millksmyre, the ridge of that low-lying marsh, is discernible; which would make a fork with the Clyde, as its name also implies, when the river as a fiord penetrated eastward, from Polmadie to Gallowflath, behind Rutherglen; but which in the course of centuries, by the natural process of absorption, drainage, and decay, has been first a marish, then a mire, and is now the course of a paltry rivulet, designated expressly in our most recent surveys, " Mall's-mire-burn" a combination of syllables which accurately represents its history. [Waddell]

The ground about Mall's Mire is low-lying and marshy, and at the present time inundations frequently take place there. The whole district of Mall's Mire at this moment [c. 1922] is a God-forsaken wilderness of demolished brickfields, colliery debris, and stagnant ditches, and its mention need not have taken up space here but for the fact of its connection with the alleged " Balclutha," which figures so largely in Dr. Waddell's Ossian and the Clyde. [Rutherglen Lore]

The subject matter of the poem, whether written by Ossian, or adapted, as has been alleged, by James Macpherson, is of no consequence whatever to Ruglonians; the play's the thing" : and if Crathmo formed part of Mall's Mire ridge, as Hately Waddell assures us it did, and if Rutherglen is the Balclutha of Ossianic creation, our interest will be stimulated, but no loss will be sustained if it should yet be proved that, in the language of Dickens, there never was " no sich a person " as Ossian, so being the Hately Waddell theories survive, for it is pleasant to reflect on one's native town as being the centre and hub of Fingal and his people. [Rutherglen Lore]

In the [1st ] statistical account of Scotland it is stated that she 'galloped off by a lane which joins the road to , Rutherglen at the Hagginshaw,2 and which, from the , difficulty he experienced in bringing her horse through , its muddy avenue, is still known by the name of Mall's mire.' [A. M. Scott]

The original Hampden Park, at what is now the Hampden Bowling Club, just outside the [Mount Florida] community council boundary, was the first purpose-built football stadium in the world. Hampden Park, where it is located today, was opened in 1903 and is the oldest international football stadium in the world. [Mount Florida Local Place Plan]

Hydrographic Feeds: Mall's Mire Burn

Hydrographic Resurgences: Mall's Mire Burn