Burial place of Hamilton of Barns

Image: © Lairich Rig Taken: 26 May 2012

The building is located just to the north-west of Image (see that item for the works that are referred to, by author, below). The inscription on the front says: "The Burial Place of the Family of Hamilton of Barns 1575-1887". Bruce (1893) notes that "the oldest family burying vault is that of the Hamiltons of Barns and Cochno, whose possessions in the parish date from the Reformation times. It has no architectural pretensions whatever". Although the building is of rather plain construction, it has some interesting details, such as the old carved stone head shown in Image (There is a similar but smaller structure just to the north of this one; it is labelled "mortuary" on early OS maps. The area in which the Hamilton of Barns vault and the mortuary are located was originally the north-western corner of the kirkyard; however, the latter was extended in 1878 by the purchase of additional land.) For detailed information about the Hamiltons of Barns and Cochno, see pages 274-282 of [Bruce]. Cochno is still familiar as a place-name today (Image), and was in the hands of the Hamilton family by the middle of the sixteenth century. As for the lands of Barns, parts of them (namely, west Barns of Clyde) were feued from the Hamiltons(*) c.1870 by Messrs J and G Thomson, who had been obliged to move from their Glasgow site. The firm had operated a Clydebank Foundry in Glasgow, and they brought the name Clydebank with them, using it for the new yard that they erected at Barns of Clyde. Clydebank Terrace was the first of the tenements built for the shipyard workers; it dated from the early 1870s, and was popularly known as Tamson's Toon (i.e., Thomson's Town). At that early period, it could not really be said that there was yet a "town of Clydebank"; at least, those who lived there would not yet have thought of it in those terms. However, when the Burgh of Clydebank was formed in 1886, it took its name from the shipyard (see page 282 of [Bruce]). (*) Specifically, the land was feued from Grace Hamilton, who lived at Cochno House, and who died unmarried in 1887. She gave generously to a number of fine causes; she is also commemorated in the name of Hamilton Free Church in Clydebank.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0