Early History
Prior to the nineteenth century, Castlehead was a tract of rising ground called Huthead. Situated to the southwest of Paisley's teeming West End, its difficult terrain and the separation provided by the Paisley and Ardrossan Canal and later the Glasgow and South Western Railway kept it apart and undeveloped. Its only buildings were a church and manse at the foot of the hill and the 1771 Old House, originally a farm. A map dated 1839 shows the remnants of a Roman encampment and there is some evidence that Huthead/Camphill, together with the hills at Oakshaw and Woodside, had made up the Roman out-station of Vanduara.
Canal Street Church, now Castlehead Church was the next building to appear. It was built by Paisley weavers between 1781-82, and later refurbished in 1868 . Among those buried in its churchyard were the poet Robert Tannahill and the maternal great-grandparents of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The President visited the site during a brief trip to Scotland in 1991 .
Read more about this topic: Castlehead
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)