Glasgow’s story begins long before there was anything to call a city. People were living along the Clyde within a few thousand years of the ice retreating: hunters on a raised shoreline, then farmers, canoe-builders and Iron Age Britons, as Glasgow before the Romans describes. Their river was wide, shallow and full of fish, and the low ground where the Molendinar Burn ran down to it would one day become the heart of the medieval town.
Rome arrived in the late first century AD and returned in force under the Emperor Antoninus Pius. The Antonine Wall, begun in AD 142, ran from the Forth to the Clyde across the hills just north of the modern city, with a fort at Bearsden whose bathhouse can still be visited. It was held for barely a generation before the legions pulled back to Hadrian’s line, but Roman activity around Glasgow left roads, coins and a frontier that shaped the region for centuries.
After Rome, the Clyde belonged to the Britons. The Kingdom of Strathclyde was ruled from Dumbarton Rock until a Viking army sacked it in 870, after which its centre of gravity moved upriver to Govan. A remarkable collection of carved stones from that period, including a sarcophagus and five Viking-age hogbacks, survives in Govan Old Parish Church. The name Glasgow itself comes from the same British language: glas and cau, usually rendered as ‘green hollow’, the root of the city’s cherished title of the ‘dear green place’.
Into this world came Kentigern, better known as St Mungo, the holy man traditionally credited with founding a church beside the Molendinar in the sixth century. The miracles told of him, the bird, the tree, the bell and the fish, still appear on the city’s coat of arms. The founding of Glasgow weighs how much of that tradition is history and how much is legend, and sets the scene for the medieval chapter that follows.
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