When the 59 acres of land was up for sale in Stonefield in 1851, including the Stonefield farm steading (Hasties) and fields where the park is today, its starting price of £2,000 ended up at £2,750 due to keen competition. The buyers being the Forrest family. They may not have realized the extent of some of the issues on the land however, for much of the fields which would later become the public park, would never be built upon, poorly drained and with a burn running right through the middle.
The Stonefield Burn shown on the 1898 map
The burn rose far to the south off Stonefield Road, near where the Bowling club is today and ran north eastwards over fields, even determining where Dixon’s Rows was built. It ran near Stonefield Farm and down to Glasgow Road, long before any tenements crossing, under the road at a low dip slightly west of where Annfield Terrace would later be built. No building would ever be built on that low dip just before the Toll Brae rose, not even to this day. North of Glasgow Road, the burn crossed the field, under the railway and to the Clyde. It may have had the nickname, “Christie’s Burn” after John Christie in the 1865 Valuation roll as nearby landowner and weaver’s agent.
In November 1962, to relieve flooding at Stonefield Road, Glasgow Road and Stonefield Public Park, a large outfall sewer was completed cross crossing through Blantyre. The sewer was dual pipeline and was of sufficient capacity to permit the capture of both sewage and stormwater from all the nearby housing estates at Stonefield Road and the surrounding district, ending up going through the Public Park and out towards the Clyde.
From the book, “Blantyre Glasgow Road South – The Real Story” by Paul Veverka (c) 2017