The cowboys of Cowlairs

The faces of three teenage boys appear from inside a den ringed by trees. They walk towards me, sizing me up. This den consists of two green gazebos, the side of a tent with a plastic window on it, bolstered by those tall grated barriers you see at festivals and around building sites. An awning stretches over an oil drum that’s used as a fire pit, and all of this sits within a man-made clearing among the trees. I’m not, as you might expect, in a giant woodland where alternative communities might settle. Instead, I’m in Cowlairs Park, an abandoned area in the heart of North Glasgow, which appears to be annexed entirely by teenagers. They’ve spotted me, so I ask if I can come in.

“Naw,” one shouts.

“Well can you come out then?” I push.

“Naw.”

But eventually, curiosity wins out. Within minutes, three boys emerge from the camp laughing amongst themselves.

“We thought you were CID if we’re bein honest,” one of the boys sporting a blue Nike-tech tracksuit says. They tell me they’ve been using this particular spot for their den for around six months, and there are “loads more” dotted around the wooded sections of the park, which remain undiscovered to outsiders like me. They have sofas, they tell me, which they get from a local man-with-van who does house clearances, but they won’t let me inside to see.

At Cowlairs, I’ve heard tales of bonfires, cars that have been set ablaze and a group of dirt bike racers who’ve carved out paths that stretch over most of the 74-acre park. It’s this unofficial race track which has brought me up here. To some Glaswegians, Cowlairs is known as a no-go zone: lawless, noisy and unpredictable. When I first arrive, I'm greeted by the remains of several burnt-out cars; nine in total but some have already been removed, leaving only their charred shadows behind. The ground is overgrown and uneven; tyre tracks and piles of burnt tyres are everywhere, and there are more discarded fireworks than flowers. Nature has reclaimed parts of Cowlairs, but it’s the bits that have been reclaimed by what look like fire-raising vandals and dirt bike time-triallers that I’m interested in.

My first interaction with the Cowlairs cowboys (actually teenagers) is when two of them on a blue dirt bike come flying over a rise, sunlight behind them, dirt spraying from the back wheel. Both are wearing balaclavas.

In true young Scottish boy-fashion, the first five questions are answered with “aye”, but eventually one of them opens up. He explains that he and his friends come here and race, and that the home-made track has been there “forever”. He doesn’t know when or who decided to turn the derelict land into a race track, but says “it keeps us off the streets… there’s nowhere else to go”.

Almost on cue, three more boys appear over the hill and the original pair quickly disappear with them. I wait for their return for a bit, before deciding to keep walking. Roughly 20 minutes later, I stumble across something I wasn’t expecting at all.

The boys I spoke to asked if I could omit the location from this article and fair’s fair — since they were kind enough to share so much with me, I’ll leave geographic specifics out of this piece. (They also said absolutely no photos). But hidden away deep in the overgrowth is a collection of elaborate makeshift dens. A makeshift settlement in an urban wasteland.