Cathkin Park

Tedious posts on the subject of football. No3 in a series of 3.

I'm starting to feel like Gordon Ottershaw from Riping Yarns. Spent most of Monday afternoon looking for the fabled home of Third Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers Football Club. Third Lanark AFC for short. Their infuriatingly sad demise can be found summarised here.

(A favourite (apocryphal?) terrace sport of the sixties and seventies was urinating on the backs of the legs of the person standing in front of you. This usually took place when the toilets (an El Dorado bottle) were enagaged and you were too drunk to find the stadium latrines. )

I made my way to Mount Florida expecting to spend a few hours going round in circles before going home with nothing in the camera. That was until out of the corner of my eye I spotted something resembling a dilapidated and disused football ground. Within a few minutes I was ankle deep in mulched leaves and looking down a fuck off big wedge of concrete terracing. Hard to believe that tens of thousands of people used to stand in this now ruined and overgrown stadium and watch a really quite successful football team do their thing. It was actually originally called Hampden Park and was the second home of Queens Park FC. It also hosted a Scotland vs England International in the late 1800's. The 'Hi Hi' as Thirds were known (not 100% sure why) moved into the ground in around 1903 when Queens Park moved over the hill to the third and final incarnation of Hampden Park, where they play to this day in tandem with the Scottish national side. The ground was renamed New Cathkin Park.

Cathkin Park is a remnant from an age when major football grounds were breathtaking amphitheatres of deep, curved terraces designed to hold vast amounts of people and not a lot else. Facilities were usually negligable and shelter from the elements was minimal unless you got under the enclosure or you had a main stand seat. You only really see these sorts of stadiums on the continent now, the vast majority of clubs in Britain opting these days for grounds that look at first sight to be made of lego, all tidy right angles and lovely plastic coloured tip up seats.

(My guess is that the sections of terracing overgrown by trees consisted of old style, possibly pre-war gravel and railway sleeper steps. The modernised concrete steps and steel crush barriers seem to have been spared most of the ravages of time and nature. )

Anyway, there I am, wandering around in the fading light and damp air trying to imagine the place packed to the rafters , say season 1960/61 in which the team scored 100 goals and finished third in the league. Instead the derelict surroundings only conjour up images of what the atmosphere at the ground must have been like in 1967, during it's last days, with crowds of a few hundred turning up to watch a doomed team go through the motions.


( Looking towards the site of the now demolished main stand. Park benches fall sorely short of modern day all seated stadium requirements.... Still, I'm sure the SPL will make arrangements.... )


Like the abandoned Blaze pitches I used to play on the place has a ghostly aura, but there are no memories here for me to cast up and make light of the situation. The damp, oppressive weather and the bare trees growing out of the older sections of terracing can only put one in mind of the grounds sad demise rather than it's glory days.