Rutherglen

Rutherglen sits on a ridge just south-east of Glasgow, across the River Clyde, and for much of its history it was not a suburb of the city but its rival. It was one of Scotland’s early royal burghs, with trading rights that in the twelfth century reached into the area where Glasgow was growing. Over the centuries Glasgow overtook it completely, but Rutherglen kept its own identity, and its long, sometimes bitter relationship with its larger neighbour is one of the oldest stories in the history of the Glasgow area.

The name

The name Rutherglen, often shortened in local speech to Ruglen, has puzzled scholars for centuries. One explanation derives it from Gaelic words meaning the red valley, perhaps after the reddish soil of the ridge. Another links it to Rhydderch, a famous king of the early medieval kingdom of Strathclyde associated with Saint Mungo, described on our Kingdom of Strathclyde page. A local historian writing in 1926 observed, with some exasperation, that etymologists, like doctors, will continue to disagree.

An early royal burgh

Rutherglen has long claimed to have been made a royal burgh by King David I in 1126, which would make it older than Glasgow as a burgh. The evidence for that exact date is weak: it first appears in a petition of 1661, at a time when the town was arguing for privileges in competition with Glasgow. But Rutherglen certainly received trading rights under David I, who reigned from 1124 to 1153, and a charter of William the Lion from the late twelfth century confirmed its status as a burgh and set out the boundaries of its trading area.

Those boundaries mattered. Medieval burghs had monopolies over trade within their districts, and Rutherglen’s rights stretched into the area where the bishops of Glasgow were building up their own burgh, created by William the Lion around 1175 and described on our medieval burgh page. Disputes over tolls and trading rights between the two towns went on for centuries.

Castle and kirk

Rutherglen had a royal castle, which played its part in the Wars of Independence. During the struggle with England it was held by an English garrison. Robert the Bruce besieged it in 1309, and it was in Scottish hands by 1313. Long afterwards, following the defeat of the supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots at the Battle of Langside in 1568, the castle was destroyed on the orders of the Regent Moray, and its stones were used for other buildings. Nothing of it remains.

Nearby stood Farme Castle, granted in the fourteenth century to Walter Stewart, father of King Robert II, the first of the Stewart kings. It survived until the 1960s. Rutherglen’s old parish church also has a long history, and local tradition links the town with several episodes in the life of William Wallace.

Losing to Glasgow

As Glasgow grew, first as a church centre and then as a trading city, Rutherglen fell steadily behind. Its petition of 1661, asking for more fairs, complained that the ancient royal burgh was falling into decay because trade was being drawn away to Glasgow. The rise of other royal burghs nearby, such as Dumbarton and Lanark, also took business away. By the eighteenth century Rutherglen was a small market town in the shadow of a booming city.

There was some consolation in a famous piece of folklore. Tradition claimed that the masons who built Glasgow Cathedral had lodged in Rutherglen and travelled to work through an underground passage, a story that historians treat as a legend rather than history.

Coal, steel and chemicals

The industrial revolution transformed Rutherglen. Coal had been mined in the area for centuries, and in the eighteenth century barges carried Rutherglen coal down the Clyde almost every day. In the nineteenth century the town filled with industry: a shipyard on the river, the Clydebridge steelworks on its eastern edge, which employed thousands by the mid-twentieth century, and the chemical works of J. and J. White at Shawfield, which from 1820 to 1967 produced most of Britain’s chromium chemicals. That works left a legacy of chromium-contaminated waste in the area that has required careful management ever since.

The town adopted the Latin motto Ex fumo fama, fame from smoke, and the local saying Let Ruglen’s lums reek briskly, wishing its chimneys a long and prosperous life. Coal mining had ended by 1950, and the heavy industries have since declined.

Rutherglen today

For most of its history Rutherglen governed itself. In 1975, under local government reorganisation, it lost its own council and became part of the City of Glasgow district, a move many residents resented. In 1996 it was transferred, with neighbouring Cambuslang, to South Lanarkshire. Today it is a busy town of around thirty thousand people with its own Main Street, town hall and sense of identity, closely tied to Glasgow but still not quite part of it, which is exactly how it has been for more than eight hundred years.

Timeline