Dams to Darnley Country Park

Disclaimer: So far I’ve only walked half of this, so please forgive me! We set off one cold Sunday morning to walk the dams and I didn’t quite appreciate the distance, or the cold so we only made it part of the way. We started at the car park in Barrhead, a little challenging to find (off Springfield Road). The car park is nothing to comment on, pretty much just a gravel area.
You start the walk around Balgray Reservoir, the paths are all nice and flat and make for easy walking. The view over the water is really lovely and relaxing. From here you keep walking around the reservoir until you get to Aurs Road (the road between Newton Mearns and Barrhead). This road is really busy at times, and people speed along the windy corners so you might have to dash across the road — be careful!
Over onto the northern part of the walk is a lot more picturesque, with more trees and interesting things to look at. Unfortunately this is where we stopped the walk, but we are planning on going back to finish it. There is no parking at this mid point, so we will need to start the walk at the other end (in the car park of the former Ashoka, now a world buffet type place).
The website for Dams to Darnley has a lot of really good information so I’d recommend reading it before heading off. A very nice peace of the countryside right in Glasgow, I’d highly recommend it for a mini getaway.

Darnley County park is a dog walkers paradise in the middle of a Glasgow suburbia housing estate.
The dams themselves are really picturesque but the one drawback is that the park itself is hard to find. Also when your their, there are no maps or signs anywhere so be prepare to walks miles to find the dams, but it’ll be worth it.
You’ll never truly feel out of the city as the M77 roars away in the background but there are great views of the city on a clear day!

Who would have guessed that nestled amongst the soulless housing developments and big box stores that constitute Darnley that there would be a rustic, rural, and rambling country park wending its way across East Renfrewshire? Well, probably no one, because for some inscrutable reason there is no place to park and there are no signs off the main road (A726) that it is even there. However, as you approach Ashoka at the Mill (coming from Thornliebank, towards Barrhead), there is a little path with some signs that will point you in. It’s right behind the Mill, actually, and presumably once upon a time they were part and parcel. The website also details several ways to find the park.
Once you find it, though, it’s absolutely lovely. It’s not quite as manicured as the nearby Rouken Glen and it’s all the more charming for it. The paths have made as little intrusion as possible into the natural landscape, with occasional benches well placed for stopping and soaking it all in. There is a lot of local history encompassed in this little park, which you can see in the dams and the mill and the reservoirs. Walking around the park will take between one to two hours, depending on how many little path offshoots you choose to explore and how often you stop to admire the view.
The only downside with this park is the unfortunate bits of litter on the edges, near the abutting residential areas. According to the website, however, a concerted effort is being made to establish this park more definitively, and that includes sprucing it up a bit with volunteers (which they are currently recruiting for).