692 



The Clydesdale. 



[Nov., 



minds on breeding a heavy horse is not clear. There is reason 

 to believe that a useful type of carrying horse had long been 

 associated with the area and no doubt the advance in road- 

 making, before the development of railway traffic, gradually 

 led men to aim at producing a heavier horse better 

 adapted for draught than for carrying. Tradition assigns in- 

 fluence in increasing weight to the use of one or two Flemish 

 stallions by the sixth Duke of Hamilton (1742-1758), and by 

 John Paterson, a farmer in Lochlyoch parish of Thankerton, 

 about the years 1715-1720. John Paterson and his stallion are 

 authentic, and the late Lawrence Drew — a noted man in his 

 time, and a great horse-breeder — credited the ownership of one 

 Flemish stallion to the sixth Duke of Hamilton. 



At a later date — about the year 1780 — a horse called Blaze, 

 owned by Mr. Scott, a farmer in Carnwath, admittedly greatly 

 improved the native breed. Mr. Scott was an ancestor of Mr. 

 James Weir, Sandilands, Lanark, President of the Clydesdale 

 Horse Society for the current year (1922-23). Blaze was pur- 

 chased in Ayrshire but whence he came to Ayrshire is not 

 clearly known. It was said by some that he came from 

 England. 



A notable breed of mares was owned by the family of Somer- 

 ville, on Lampits farm in Carnwath parish, where there is a 

 ford across Clyde. These Lampits mares were reputed to be of 

 the Lochlyoch stock of John Paterson, and to one of them 

 has been assigned a very powerful influence in the develop- 

 ment of the modern Clydesdale. She was bought at a sale at 

 Shotts Hill Mill in 1808. It may be doubted whether the 

 links which bind the modern Clydesdale to this particular mare 

 are quite as clearly established as the writer of the Introductory 

 History to the Ketrospective Volume of the Clydesdale Stud 

 Book supposed — but her influence was great — and Glancer, 

 alias Thompson's Black Horse 335, was unquestionably a well- 

 known and much valued sire. What is clearly and incontro- 

 vertibly established is that the Clydesdale as bred in Aberdeen- 

 shire and the north, in Galloway in the south, in the Kintyre 

 peninsula, in Ayrshire and Benfrewshire in the west, and 

 in Cumberland in the north of England, is descended directly 

 from Lanarkshire horses and mares purchased during the first 

 quarter of the nineteenth century in the Upper Ward of 

 Lanarkshire or Clydesdale. The links that bind these sections 

 of the Clydesdale breed to the fountain-head are clearly defined 

 and historically sure. 



