According to William Imrie’s Both Sides of the Burn: The Story of Yoker (Bell, Aird and Coghill, 1966: p.39), Scotstoun House originally stood to the south of Dumbarton Road to the south of the current Ardsloy Place.

The entrance to the original Scotstoun House was located just off Dumbarton Road. This photo – taken some years after the House itself has been demolished – shows the deep hedgerows delineating the estate. To the left is the walled entranceway to the mansion house.

Sandra Malcolm notes that on dark winter nights these hedges were spoken of with fear: ‘their bad reputation came from an incident in which a ship’s carpenter was set upon by two men and one of the would-be robbers was accidentally fatally stabbed with an adze’ (Malcolm, S., Old Scotstoun and Whiteinch 2003: p.6).

Further along the entrance drive to the original House stood two impressive Sphinx statues – shown here in a 1913 photograph looking south, towards the Clyde. In the background can be seen a trailer of trucks being shunted along the railway. These sphinx outlasted the House itself – surviving long into the 20th Century.

Interestingly, the sphinx statues were actually designed for Shawfield Mansion - an early 18th century mansion house which sat at the mouth of Glassford Street in Glasgow City Centre. At Shawfield these statues remained until 1792, when the House and orchard garden were demolished and the present-day Glassford Street laid through the feu. The Glassfords, owners of Shawfield Mansion, would have been on close terms with their fellow merchants, the Oswalds and this is perhaps why the statues adorned the entrancway to the first Scotstoun House.