Bonkle House
My journey began at Bonkle House, our accommodation for the night, sitting high above a surprisingly deep and steep sided valley. Just a few metres below, the Auchter Water winds its way down the slope before joining the South Calder Water. This meeting of two waters is not just scenic. This location explains exactly why people chose this spot long before anyone built Bonkle House.
The present house dates from 1886, but it stands on the site of a much older fort known as Dunannibher, meaning the fort above the meeting of the waters. Whoever built that fort understood the advantage immediately. With steep slopes on one side and water below, it was both defensible and difficult to approach unnoticed. Even today, standing at the edge and looking down, you can see why it made sense. You could not wander up here casually without someone seeing you.
Bonkle It’s Meaning
The name Bonkle itself likely comes from Margaret Bonkylle, daughter of Baron de Bonkylle of Duns and wife of Allan Stewart. Through this marriage in the late thirteenth century, the powerful Stewart family became closely connected to the area. Over time, the name Bonkle came to refer not just to a person, but to the wider settlement that grew here.
Geography defined Bonkle. The South Calder Water formed its northern boundary, while the Auchter Water marked its western edge. These rivers were not obstacles. They were resources, providing water, natural protection, and clear limits to the estate lands. Long before maps and fences, rivers did the job perfectly well.
Inside, Bonkle House still reflects its Victorian origins. Stained glass windows survive, and a sweeping staircase rises through the centre of the building. It speaks of confidence and permanence, built at a time when Lanarkshire was becoming one of the industrial powerhouses of Scotland. Yet its position, chosen centuries earlier, reminds you that this landscape had strategic importance long before coal, steel, or industry arrived.
From this quiet hilltop, it is possible to see both the ancient and industrial stories of Lanarkshire begin to unfold.
Greenhead Moss, The Perchy
If you drive through Bonkle, Cambusnethan, Newmains, and Wishaw, it feels like houses stretch on forever. Street after street, row after row.
Nothing suggests wilderness. Nothing suggests ancient landscape. And yet it is there.
I only learned its local name after speaking to residents. I had already noticed the nature reserve on Google Maps, but it was only after chatting with locals that I heard it called The Perchy. In the reserve there is a small loch named the Perchy. The name, perhaps, comes from the perch that lived in its waters, and still likely do. It is not an official name you will find on signs, but one that survives through everyday use. The Perchy itself sits quietly among the trees, its surface often dotted with swans and alive with birdlife.
Greenhead Moss Community Nature Reserve
Greenhead Moss Community Nature Reserve spreads across nearly 100 hectares, a surprising expanse of woodland and peat bog hidden in plain sight. What makes it even more remarkable is its age. The moss began forming after the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago, as layers of peat slowly built up in permanently waterlogged ground. Beneath your feet lies a landscape older than the villages and industry that surround it.
This is not untouched wilderness. People have shaped the moss for centuries. They cut peat here for fuel, and during the industrial period, mining expanded across the surrounding area. Evidence of this still remains. While walking through the reserve, I crossed an old railway bridge and followed the line of a shallow cutting, the unmistakable remains of a mineral railway. These lines once carried coal away from local pits, linking Bonkle and the wider Lanarkshire coalfield to Scotland’s industrial network. Today, the rails have gone, but the earth still shows where they once ran.
Why we have Greenhead Moss Community Nature Reserve
By the late twentieth century, mining and industry had heavily altered parts of the moss and surrounding land. Recognising its ecological importance, the area was officially designated as Greenhead Moss Community Nature Reserve in 1989. Since then, it has been gradually restored through careful conservation work. Paths were created to allow access while protecting sensitive peatland. Woodland has regenerated. Wildlife has returned.
Local volunteers continue to play an important role in caring for the reserve. A dedicated community group helps maintain paths, monitor wildlife, and protect the moss for future generations. Their work ensures this ancient landscape survives, not as a forgotten fragment, but as a living, accessible place.
I began near the Cambusnethan Miners Welfare and disappeared into the woods, first discovering Kenny’s Pool and the Blue Staircase. Within moments, the transition is complete. Frogs were already courting openly on the path ahead, while nearby a roe deer buck moved calmly between the trees, nibbling vegetation and entirely undisturbed by my presence.
What makes Greenhead Moss so special is not just what it is, but where it is. Surrounded on all sides by housing, industry, and roads, it survives almost unnoticed. From above, on a map, it appears as a sudden interruption in the streets. On the ground, it feels like stepping into a landscape that has quietly endured for thousands of years.
The Mystery of the Blue Staircase Numbers
I asked the locals I was walking with, pointing to the numbers on each step of the Blue Staircase. None of them knew what they meant. They had walked here countless times, but the numbers had simply become part of the scenery. Curious, I did a little digging later and discovered a possible explanation more remarkable than I had imagined.
Each number represents time.
When you stand on a step marked 6500, you are standing beside peat that began forming 6,500 years ago at that exact depth. With every step, you are moving not just through the landscape, but through thousands of years of natural history. The peat accumulated slowly, year after year, as plants grew, died, and compressed in the permanently wet ground. What appears to be solid ground is actually a vertical timeline, layer upon layer, recording environmental change across millennia.
The staircase makes this invisible process visible. It allows you to understand immediately the immense age of the moss. Long before Bonkle House was built, before the coal mines, before the villages and streets, this moss was already forming quietly, one year at a time.
It is rare to find a place where you can stand beside 6,500 years of history and not even realise it.
The Man the Moss Refused to Forget
While walking through Greenhead Moss, locals told me about another mystery they had discovered via google maps. Not for wildlife. Not for peat. But for a man. A bog body.
He was discovered by accident on 23 March 1932, when a worker digging peat struck something unexpected beneath the surface. Around two feet down lay the fully clothed remains of a man, preserved by the moss itself. His jacket, cap, and leather shoes were still intact, protected for centuries by the cold, acidic, oxygen poor conditions of the peat. (Wikipedia)
From the beginning, speculation filled the gaps left by fact. Early newspaper reports declared him a Covenanter, one of the religious rebels hunted and killed during Scotland’s violent seventeenth century conflicts. It was a compelling story, and one that endured for decades. (Enlighten Publications) But modern research has changed that interpretation completely.
Detailed analysis of his clothing revealed that it did not belong to the seventeenth century at all. Instead, it dated from the late eighteenth century. This meant he could not have been a Covenanter. He was someone else entirely. (Wikipedia)
About the Man in the Bog
The man was around fifty years old when he died. His body had not been formally buried in consecrated ground, but placed deliberately in the bog. Cut marks found on his cap and shoe suggest he may have been stabbed, raising the strong possibility that he was a victim of violence. (Wikipedia)
Who he was, why he died, and who put him there remain unanswered.
His remains were removed and taken into the care of Glasgow Museums, where they are still preserved today. The moss had done its work too well. It protected him, but it did not explain him. (dokumen.pub)
Today, a simple cairn marks the place where he was found.
Visitors walk past it, often without knowing the full story. Yet beneath the trees and quiet paths, the moss still holds its silence. It preserved the man for over two centuries, but it kept his identity for itself. And it still does.
Wishaw’s Faded Grandeur
The name Wishaw has several possible origins, each reflecting the landscape long before the town became industrial. One suggestion is that it comes from “Via shaw,” meaning way through the woods, possibly referring to an ancient route, even a Roman road, that once passed through the area. Another interpretation is “Wee Shaw,” meaning small wood, while others believe the “wis” element may come from an old Scots word linked to water, giving the meaning water wood. In Scottish Gaelic, the town is known as Camas Neachdain, meaning Nechtan’s bend or Nechtan’s river bend, likely referring to a curve in the nearby river.
Today, it is a town shaped by change, where the grand industrial purpose of the past has given way to a quieter reality, its high street now lined with charity shops, pound shops, and cash for gold stores, practical signs of a community adapting to a very different world.
Wishaw grew from a small rural settlement into a major industrial town during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, driven almost entirely by coal mining and heavy industry. Pits surrounded the town, and rows of miners’ houses were built quickly to serve them, connected by railways that carried coal across Lanarkshire and beyond. Later, the nearby Ravenscraig steelworks, once one of the largest in Western Europe, dominated the skyline and provided employment for thousands. When the mines and steelworks closed in the late twentieth century, Wishaw lost the industry that had defined it for generations. Today, the town still carries the physical shape of that industrial confidence, but there is also a sense of faded grandeur, a place built for a purpose that no longer exists, yet still standing as a reminder of Scotland’s industrial past.
Kingshill Nature Reserve and the Old Pit
I drove from Bonkle House to nearby Allanton, a village closely tied to the same estate and industrial history. Unfortunately, Google Maps tried to send me out of the village and down what quickly became a farm track. It did not feel right, and it was not right. My advice is simple. Ignore it. I retraced my route and returned to Allanton, parking instead near the primary school.
Unsure of the exact entrance, I asked a friendly dog walker where the nature reserve was. He looked momentarily puzzled, then smiled in recognition.
“Oh, you mean the Pit.”
That single word said everything. To locals, this was not first and foremost a nature reserve. It was the old pit. Its original identity still intact.
He pointed me in the right direction, and I set off. But after fifteen minutes, with paths splitting and no obvious signs, doubt crept in again. I spotted another local gentleman and asked for help. His name was Neil, and what followed was one of those encounters that transforms a walk into something far richer. Neil not only showed me the way, but joined me for the next hour, sharing the story of the land as we walked.
History of Kingshill Colliery
Kingshill was once home to Kingshill No.1 Colliery, opened in 1919 by Coltness Iron Company Ltd. At its peak, nearly 1,500 men and women worked here. It was the deepest colliery in the area, with shafts reaching 344 and 371 metres underground. The bing itself rose around 200 feet above the landscape, an unmistakable landmark of industry. The pit finally closed in 1968, leaving behind not just physical scars, but a community shaped entirely by its existence.
As we walked, Neil pointed out the faint lines where the old bogey routes once ran. These small wagons carried coal across the site, linking pithead to railway. The rails are gone now, but the landscape still holds their imprint. Once you know what you are looking for, you begin to see them everywhere.
He also showed me something more recent. The burn that runs through the site glowed a vivid orange, stained by iron oxide leaching from the old mine workings. Neil calls it the ‘red slime’. It was immediately familiar to me. I remembered the same bright orange burns from my childhood in Plean, another former pit village, where our own old pit is now Plean Country Park. There too, the land has been reclaimed, but the chemistry of mining still reveals itself.
At Kingshill, new efforts are underway to address this legacy. Sediment pools have been created to capture the iron rich water and allow the oxide to settle. Earlier attempts used natural reed beds and rushes to filter the water, but these were not always effective enough. Now, there is growing interest not just in containing the iron oxide, but in extracting it, turning a pollutant into a resource.
Every changing landscapes
As we walked, life continued around us. Frogs were courting, again, in the shallows, completely absorbed in their ancient rituals. Wildlife has returned to a place once defined entirely by extraction and labour.
Neil explained how there had once been many pits across this landscape, each feeding the industries that built modern Scotland. Today, most physical structures are gone. But the people remember. They still call it the Pit.
In many ways, I understood that instinctively. I was born and raised in Plean, another former pit village. Our own pit and estate have become woodland, paths, and wildlife. But beneath the surface, the history remains. These places are not just nature reserves. They are landscapes of memory, shaped by generations who lived and worked here.
Kingshill is not just the return of nature. It is the continuation of a story.
Red Slime the new wave industry
increasingly recognised as a useful material rather than simply pollution. Once collected and dried, it can be used as a natural pigment to colour paints, lime mortar, bricks, and concrete, giving warm red, yellow, and brown tones that are especially valued in traditional building conservation. It is also used in environmental projects to help filter pollutants from water, as iron oxide naturally binds to certain contaminants. In some areas, organisations now recover this material from former mining sites and treatment pools, turning a legacy of coal mining into a practical resource.
What once stained the burns bright orange is now seen as something a future.
The Boxer at the Roundabout
Standing quietly beside the Newmains roundabout is the bronze figure of a young man in fighting stance. Gloves raised. Focused. Ready. This is James “Jim” Murray, a local boy whose life and legacy remain deeply rooted in this community.
Jim Murray was born in Lanarkshire in 1969 and grew up in the towns and villages shaped by coal, industry, and tight knit communities. He was not an outsider who came to fame elsewhere. He was one of their own. Like many young men here, he worked ordinary jobs, at one point as a landscape gardener, while pursuing boxing with determination and discipline. (The Independent)
He turned professional in 1993 and quickly built a reputation for toughness and resilience in the ring. Fighting as a bantamweight, he won the Scottish Area bantamweight title in 1994 and successfully defended it, compiling an impressive professional record of 15 wins and just 2 losses. (Wikipedia)
Boxing was not simply sport. It was purpose. It was identity.
On 13 October 1995, at just 25 years old, Murray stepped into the ring in Glasgow to fight Drew Docherty for the British bantamweight title. It was the biggest fight of his career. The bout went the full twelve rounds, a gruelling contest of endurance and courage. Near the end of the fight, he collapses in the ring after suffering a brain injury. Jim is rushed to hospital and underwent emergency surgery, but died two days later. (Wikipedia)
His death sent shockwaves through the boxing world and through Lanarkshire itself. This was not a distant professional athlete. This was someone people knew. Someone who had walked these same streets.
The impact of his death led directly to change. In response, promoters established the Murray Stone Fund, helping to finance brain scans for boxers, improving safety and protecting future fighters. His legacy did not end with his death. It helped safeguard others. (Wikipedia)
The statue now stands by the side of the busy roundabout, not in a museum or hidden away, but in the centre of everyday life. It shows him wearing his championship belt, forever captured in the moment he had worked towards. (Tripadvisor)
People drive past it every day. Some glance. Or stop. Some remember.
In former mining communities like Newmains and Allanton, resilience and strength were always part of life. Jim Murray embodied both. He was not just a boxer. He was part of this place.
And here, beside the road, he still is.
A Landscape That Keeps Its Secrets
Bonkle, the Perchy, and the surrounding land reveal their stories slowly. From the faded elegance of Bonkle House to the ancient peat of Greenhead Moss, from the preserved mystery of the bog body to the reclaimed ground of the old pits at Kingshill, this is a landscape shaped by both time and people. Industry once defined it. Coal was cut, railways ran, and communities grew around the work. Today, nature has returned, quietly reclaiming what was disturbed. Frogs court in former mine workings, roe deer move undisturbed through woodland, and iron rich burns still carry the chemistry of the past.
Most people pass through without ever knowing what lies just beyond the houses. But hidden behind the streets is a landscape that remembers everything, holding centuries of human ambition, hardship, and recovery in plain sight.