This is a lovely wood for a quiet evening stroll. Literally, it means ‘hawthorn' wood, but you would have to look carefully to find any. The name must refer to hawthorns which were growing here naturally or possibly a hawthorn nursery, providing the saplings necessary for the eighteenth century hedgerows of much of the island. In any case, the present wood is not natural but a plantation, dating from the Napoleonic war. Skeoch Wood became notorious in the decades either side of 1900, for it was used as a camping ground by those who had come by steamer but who could find no room to rent, particularly when the weather was wet. Then the wood would fill with improvident and drenched, or 'drookit' Glaswegians. There is probably no human activity that this wood has not seen: babies conceived or born while others sloughed their mortal coil. The current plantation is not even a century old, for virtually the whole wood was felled to provide timber during the First World War.