Qualla: Pollok House

Pollok House: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jam0mac, CC BY-SA 4.0. Almost seven hundred years. From the medieval period until 1966, the Stirling-Maxwell family held the lands of Pollok on the south side of Glasgow. When Dame Anne Maxwell Macdonald finally gifted the estate to the City of Glasgow in 1966, she ended a tenure that began before Bannockburn and ran through the Reformation, the Union of the Crowns, the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, and the rise of the modern welfare state. The house that anchors the estate - Pollok House, built in 1752 - sits inside Pollok Country Park, which also holds the Burrell Collection. Inside the house is something genuinely unexpected for a Glasgow country mansion: a private collection of Spanish paintings considered one of the finest in Britain.

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Image: Jam0mac | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pollok House: An Adam House by the White Cart

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Upson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The house was built in 1752 and is originally thought to have been designed by William Adam, though Adam may only have been consulted rather than fully commissioned. It was extended in the early 20th century by Rowand Anderson, the prolific Edinburgh architect best known for the ...

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Image: Chris Upson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pollok House: The Spanish Paintings

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John McLeish, CC BY-SA 2.0. How a Glasgow country house ended up with paintings by El Greco, Francisco Goya, Alonso Sánchez Coello, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is a story of one family's deep and unusual taste. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, the 19th-century baronet, was one of the first British scholars t...

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Image: John McLeish | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pollok House: The Pollok Witches

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LornaMCampbell, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1677, six people were arrested for attempting to murder Sir George Maxwell of Pollok by witchcraft, allegedly causing his illness by roasting a wax image of him. The accused were five women and one man: Jonet Mathie, Annabell Stewart, John Stewart, Bessie Weir, Marjorie Craige...

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Image: LornaMCampbell | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pollok House: The Gardens and the Beech

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LornaMCampbell, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pollok's gardens are extensive enough to hold a collection of more than 1,000 species of rhododendrons. Behind the main house grows the Pollok Park Beech, a Fagus sylvatica thought to be 250 years old. Its trunk is unusually swollen - seven metres in girth at the ground, ten metr...

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Image: LornaMCampbell | CC BY-SA 4.0