THE momentous rate of migration from Ireland to Lanarkshire during the mid-19th century left an indelible legacy and I went to meet some of those working to keep

FIFTY years ago, when folk said they were going up the Clydeside, it meant a day out picking fruit.

THIS week Prince Charles, with riband stars and tinsel show, announced that his mother’s Government would not attempt to cure the cost of living crisis by spending money.

ON Good Friday in Salt Lake City, Utah, I made a pilgrimage to a place of martyrdom. At the edge of a public park, a blue-haired Catholic anarchist named Pegasus pointed to the patch of grass upon which the labour organiser and songwriter Joe Hill was executed in 1915. There is no monument or plaque, but next to the last crumbling section of the Sugar Park prison wall, we sang the lines from the famous Ballad of Joe Hill: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me/Says I, ‘But

IN the blistering April sun, against the backdrop of a giant boulder resembling a red Castle Rock, a pipe band played the last set of the Redstone Highland Games. The pipe master boasted that the Salt Lake Scots’ final showpiece was composed by a visiting Scot who was “so impressed that we could keep our pipes going in the American desert”.

ON the first Saturday of spring, Lanark was jumping with dancing children. When I tried a door by Greyfriars Parish Church hoping to view the kirk’s Gothic interior, I caught sight of dozens of kids in a musical theatre session of the Fever Pitch Academy. A moment later, on the sunny high street, I passed a trio of girls tripping along with Dance Rite Academy, a Lanark-based dance and cheer club, emblazoned on their T-shirts.

IN primary five, we learned Kenneth McKellar’s “Song of the Clyde”. “Of all Scottish rivers it’s dearest to me,” I sang with 60 other Glaswegian school kids, “it flows from Leadhills all the way to the sea.”

‘THERE is a fine line between fact and folklore in Leadhills,” the chairman of the village’s Miners’ Library chuckled. I was pleased to hear it. This queer village high among the heather-laden Lowther Hills was the first stop on my trail to explore some truths and tales of working life along the Clyde.

THURSDAY brought the bizarre news that Boris Johnson is to reintroduce imperial weights and measures as a legal standard for markets, shops, and supermarkets. Some were quick to compare Boris Johnson’s jingoistic wisdom to Grandpa Simpson’s gripe about the metric system being "the tool of the devil".