The New Port of Glasgow cut out the vexatious Greenock middleman. Greenock’s near monopoly in the transhipment business irritated Glasgow’s merchants and civic officials, and disputes over taxes and tariffs frequently broke out. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships they usually transferred their cargoes at Greenock, three or four miles further west, to smaller vessels, barges and wherries that were rowed or poled the final twenty-odd miles to the Glasgow warehouses. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. T he most unexpected building in Port Glasgow is a castle – Newark Castle, inherited in the 17th century by the Maxwell family, who turned it from an austere tower house into what the guidebook calls a Renaissance mansion.
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