Carluke


South Lanarkshire

Rankin Memorial Clock, High Street, Carluke
©2022 Gazetteer for Scotland

Rankin Memorial Clock, High Street, Carluke

Situated on a high plateau at an elevation of 198m (650 feet), Carluke overlooks the middle reaches of the River Clyde in South Lanarkshire. It lies on the Jock's Burn, 6 miles (10 km) northwest of Lanark and was in 1662 chartered as a royal burgh also know as Kirkstyle. A Roman road passed this way and a number of tower houses were built in the locality. Carluke developed in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries in association with corn milling, cotton weaving, coal mining and the manufacture of bricks, glass, confectionery and jam. Carluke has had a station on the West Coast Main Line railway from Carstairs Junction to Central Station in Glasgow since 1848, and this benefits from a £2-million park-and-ride facility which opened in 2010.

Miltonhead, 1¼ miles (2 km) to the west southwest, was the birthplace in 1726 of the military surveyor Major General William Roy. Milton Lockhart, 2 miles (3 km) to the west, was the home of John Lockhart, the biographer of Sir Walter Scott. In 1987 the remains of Milton Lockhart House were transported to Japan and re-erected near Tokyo. Peter Kid, one of Carluke's 17th Century Covenanting ministers, was imprisoned on the Bass Rock.

Carluke gained the epithet "a town called courage" having had three of its sons awarded the Victoria Cross, more per head of population that any other community in Britain. These were William Angus (1915), Thomas Caldwell (1918) and Donald Cameron (1943). All three now have streets named in their honour, with the signs paid for by financier Sir Angus Grossart (b. 1937), who was brought up in the town.


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