Plinths & Plaques, Statues and Graves
As with not just this but all our trails, local, national and country, we hold the view that merely recording or even putting on-line is a start but not enough. To do justice to the pioneers, as have a few clubs, even countries, to which they went, as in Scotland in the case of Tommy Donohoe and following the lead of Brazils's Bangu, Busby has too and as has SHFG again in Scotland, but also in England and Northern Ireland, there should be, both at home and elsewhere, place for more statues, golden or otherwise, restored, maintained graves, busts on plinths and if not them then plaques.
So, whilst we research and provide biographical and other details of as many of those Scots, native and Diasporan, who through deed and feet spread globally and uniquely the footballing word, we also look at where, in places from which they came or they rest, and as visual expression of our contemporary, national pride in them and those same localities, some form of physical, outdoor recognition would be both appropriate and feasible.
The Loudoun - Irvine Valley Trail
(Darvel, Newmilns and Galston)
Football not in but in a way from Loudoun was to have to have influence on the Scottish game from remarkably early on. In fact, but for it, Rangers might never have become the same force in the Scottish game.
When Janet Vallance by 1881 had moved into a new home, perhaps the family's first house of their own, in Rhu in Dunbartonshire she named it Loudoun Cottage. The name was a recollection of where almost sixty years she had been born, on a remote farmstead at Burnfoot high above the valley of the River Irvine in Ayrshire, with its three main villages of Darvel, Newmilns and Galston. Janet Vallance was, of course, the mother of Tom and Alex Vallance, both players for, seven times international Tom from 1874, Alex a year earlier, and captains of the now Ibrox, then nascent Glasgow Green club. It had been founded in 1872, pre-dating official Loudoun football by a full decade and a half.
Tom Vallance
Burnfoot
Alex Vallance
However, once in place Loudoun football specifically will, notably in Sweden and Spain, in Gothenburg and Barcelona, be forever interwoven with the two small towns cum villages below Burnfoot, Darvel and still more so Newmilns; the material, the filaments connecting them being lace. Where their textile workers went to set up factories so too went the game.
And the neighbouring, mainly mining-town of Galston too has left its comparable, globally formative legacy particularly in the USA, with all three communities also making to this day contributions to the Scottish and therefore British games that are remarkable given their populations, then and now.
Indeed such is the number that a trail emerges, one you can create, five miles long soin this case is best driven and can be rounded off with science, for Darvel is also the birthplace of Alexander Fleming.
Barcelona
Girvan and Blacks
Willie (and David) Gold
John Hamilton
Gothenburg
John Lawson
The Players (By Birth)(By Birthplace)(By Residence)
1860s
The Turners(D)
Hughie Wilson(N)
Davie Calderhead(G)
John Lawson(N)
The Shields(N)
Gavin Crawford(G)
Hugh Pollock(N)
David Russell(G)
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