Lanarkshire follows the River Clyde through central Scotland from its wild, mountainous source near the Dumfriesshire border down to the city of Glasgow, and was traditionally divided into three wards: the upper ward around the county town of Lanark, the middle ward around Hamilton, and the lower ward taking in Glasgow itself. An eighteenth-century traveller's account of the upper Clyde dwelt at length on the river's dramatic falls at Corra Linn and Stonebyres, where the water was described rushing 'with horrid fury' between wooded rocks in scenery whose 'sublime horrors' left visitors momentarily unable to gather their thoughts, a spectacle that had already made the new road from Lanark to Glasgow a celebrated tourist route.
At Lanark itself, cotton works employing some 1,400 people were, by the 1790s, among the most extensive in Scotland, an early sign of the industrial transformation about to overtake the upper Clyde valley in the years immediately following, when the mill village nearby would become the site of Robert Owen's pioneering experiment in humane factory management. Sheep of the Galloway and Cheviot breeds grazed the county's southern uplands around Tinto Hill and the lead-bearing Lowther range, while the fertile lower ward around Glasgow supported dairying, orchards and market gardens that fed the growing city.
Hamilton Palace, seat of the Dukes of Hamilton, and the nearby French-named house of Chatelherault, recalling the family's historic ties to France, stood among the county's grandest houses, while Bothwell Bridge, scene of the Covenanters' defeat by government forces in 1679, and the physician Dr William Cullen, born in the county and among the most influential medical teachers of his age, gave Lanarkshire a place in both Scotland's religious history and its intellectual life, well before its coalfields and ironworks made it the industrial heartland of the nineteenth century.