Running the Parks

Run time : 1:03:37 Distance covered : 6.68m (5.60km) Soundtrack : Orphan X , Gregg Hurwitz Conditions : warm and cloudy I know some parts of Glasgow like the back of my hand. Pollok, Crookston and the surrounding areas are not included in that. I'm not sure why I've so rarely ventured into the south-western suburbs, but my lack of familiarity for the area led to me missing one of the parks I'd intended to hit, running a couple of miles out of my way, and accidentally doing a 10k. It's got a really different feel from the rest of the city. Instead of sandstone villas and tenements and orderly street layouts, it's bungalows and dual carriageways and meandering diversions. In places it feels almost more like a new town. That's probably because it was built around the post-war period as the new towns, and had some of the same goals, to take overspill from the city. Anyway, I'd planned to start at Househill Park , then run down to Lochar P...

Run time : 40 or 50 minutes on and off? Distance covered : about 4 miles Soundtrack : Two Crime Writers and a Microphone podcast Conditions : overcast but warm No proper stats for this one as Strava glitched, but it doesn't matter too much as I'll need to come back to this park to cover more of it. It's massive, so massive in fact that I got lost and came out an entrance a mile away from where I parked. Pollok Park is one of those places I hadn't been in years, and couldn't remember anything about, but when I got there it was like a whole section of childhood memories became unarchived. I remember the house. My parents took me to the park as a kid, and I would ask about the next time we would be going to "Pok House". It's easily the biggest of the Glasgow parks, and was names Britain's best park in 2007. The Wikipedia page is naturally more fleshed out than those for the other parks. Originally part of the Old Pollok Estate, and the...