Gartness Hamlet, and The Snug

The houses which form the stone terrace at Gartness were the workers’ cottages for the woollen blanket mill which is on the river side of the road at the far end from the bridge. The mill and these workers’ houses were built in 1745, from a sandstone quarry about 50 yards up the river bank.

Just beyond the dam which created the head of water to drive the looms in the mill, which was twice as big as the cottage which now exists there. The turreted stone building was the wheel-house for the water-power, running down the lade from the dam, and immediately under the garden building of The Hideaway, over the road.

These gardens used to be the allotments for all the houses along the row, and just behind The Snug were the outside toilets for all the houses apart from South-West House at the far end of the row, which was the mill manager’s house, so was bigger, and also had more land, including the bank between the lade and the Endrick Water, right up to the bridge. Salmon and sea-trout used to swim up the lade past the cottage’s garden, and into Craigbel pool above the dam, but the flow from the dam down the lade and through the old wheelhouse used to be strong, but gradually filled up and is now pretty derelict.

The woollen mill itself stopped operating sometime around WWII, lay derelict until 1980, when a woman from Glasgow with a weekend cottage in the row, bought it and converted it into the present smaller cottage, from the original stone-building. A Polish builder Charlie Fischer, from the local village, Balfron, did the conversion. At one period during the 1980s, there were just four single people living in Gartness – three women all over 70, and one man in his 90s, who died at 101, still growing his own vegetables. 

Gartness used to be a quiet hamlet, with what visitors it received coming to see the Pots of Gartness, the salmon-leap only a short walk away. Even now, with pollution, netting in the estuaries, and more, it can be spectacular in the early autumn, September-October, as the migratory fish head upstream to spawn in tiny burns on the moors, then begin their migration cycle, returning to the same small burns to breed.

The Pots waterfall is much bigger than the tiny one at the pool under the bridge, which the fish just swim up, unnoticed. Some visitors mistake this for “The Salmon Leap” proper. A gamekeeper Bob King lived for many years with his family, a couple of doors from The Snug. He was a keen fly-fisherman, and made his own rods, tied his own flies, and would often leave a salmon on a neighbours’ doorstep after a good day on the river. He would also trap pheasants for food by making a trail of seed across the shared space at the back and into a trap in his garage.