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The Rising Burgh: 1560 to 1770s

Neighbourhoods

Balornock

By Aileen Smart

Glasgow, 1795 In 1652, two years after the Reformation, Canon William Baillie ensured the succession of the Baillie family as lairds of Provan by granting his son a feu charter of the whole estate of Provan listing "Balornoc" among the separate parts of the former prebend. In 1593 the lands passed by marriage to the Hamiltons of Silvertonhill and were sold off to the Town of Glasgow in 1667. Parts of Provan were by now feued out, including part of Balornock granted in 1635 to Thomas Law, minister at Inchinnan in Renfrewshire, and his spouse, Jean Hamilltoun.

Delftfield bottle In 1691 Robert Dinwiddie, who came from Dumfriesshire, was granted a charter of the lands of Germiston and part of "Ballornock". His son, Lawrence Dinwiddie (1696-1764), a tobacco merchant whose ship the Blandford traded to America and Europe, was provost of Glasgow from 1742 to 1745, and in 1748 bought back the family estate which his brother had lost through bankruptcy. Another brother, Robert Dinwiddie (1692-1770), was Governor of Virginia for six years from 1751.

Germiston House Lawrence Dinwiddie, the Tobacco Lord, also founded the Delftfield Pottery at Anderston in 1748 with the intention of exploiting the deposits of clay on the family estate. Although this proved to be unsuitable and clay had to be imported from Ireland, Delftfield soon rivalled the great Staffordshire potteries.

Germiston House was built around 1690 and is described in The Old Country houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry. Ballornock House appears on Forrest's map of 1816, but not on Richardson's map of 1795 which shows only the farms of High and Low Balornock.


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