In Search of Trocchi’s Cain

By Stephen Wilton

A walk through the docks that line the murky waters of the River Clyde lays echo to the once thriving Glaswegian shipyards. An ethereal reminder of heavy industry’s decay, the former shipyards now serve as loose foundations for the business park of today. A speckling of twisted, unarmed cranes scrawl skeleton-like along the lengthy expanses of the North Bank as the barge canals of the Forth and Clyde—while still providing welcome punctuation to the endless grey-sandstone tenements of a Victorian past—slip silently by.

It was these very canals that provided the backdrop ...