THAT Commonwealth Games reaches everywhere.

There might not be an obvious connection between the colourful vibrant Games, and an overgrown, forgotten graveyard in Shettleston, but there is one.

The old cemetery in Shettleston Road is hidden behind an 8ft, 2ft-thick, stone wall. The grass was waist high, and only now with it being cut back can the stones dating back to the 18th century be seen. Curiously there is a large space in the middle where there are no gravestones. That's simply because Shettleston Parish Church stood there until it collapsed due to coal mining making the ground unstable. The kirk elders and the mine owners were negotiating for permission to mine below the church. Seems nobody told the miners that discussions were still taking place.

At the entrance stand two stone sentry boxes where relatives took turns to stand guard over the recently deceased to thwart enthusiastic medical students from the university arriving in their "death coaches" seeking fresh corpses for anatomy classes.

A group of schoolchildren were being taken round the graveyard and shown the sentry boxes. "My granny told me," piped up one wee girl, "that they were the lifts to heaven."

The reason the youngsters can see round the graveyard is that it is part of the Shettleston Heritage Trail which has been recognised as a Games Legacy for Glasgow project. Shettleston is at the edge of Tollcross Park where the Commonwealth swimming is taking place, so the Heritage Trail was highlighted as one of the community projects helping to lift the profile of surrounding areas.

In truth, most Glaswegians' knowledge of Shettleston is as overgrown and forgotten as the graveyard. Mentally ticking off the east end, with Parkhead you think of Celtic, Bridgeton has the Barras, Easterhouse and Frankie Vaughan collecting gang weapons, Carntyne and Billy Connolly's song about three chaps from there with a dog called Bob. But Shettleston never had an iconic image. Mind you, as a young reporter on the Evening Times I was aware that fiery editor Charlie Wilson, who went on to edit the Times of London, came from Shettleston, so it was always better to be a bit cavalier geographically and move any negative story about Shettleston into a neighbouring area, to avoid his wrath.

Although Glasgow is sometimes known as "the dear green place" it was the dear black coal underneath the ground that transformed Shettleston from farmland to an early centre of coal mining. With the coal came industry, with industry came jobs, and with jobs, housing. Shettleston Ropeworks stretched for half-a-mile, supplying hemp and wire rope around the British Empire. The North British Bottle Manufacturing Company went into overdrive after prohibition came to an end in America, and had 24-hour production. There was an iron works too, so with hundreds of thirsty workers sweating away in overheated production, it was no wonder that so many pubs proliferated along Shettleston Road. In fact most people giving you directions in Shettleston will use pub names as landmarks rather than street names.

As one old Shettlestonian, if that is the word, told me: "The shift finishing mid morning at the bottle works were so thirsty that they would send one man ahead to the pub ten minutes before the shift finished to line up the pints for them. So pity the poor server who innocently asked the one guy coming in what he wanted, and he replied, 'Twelve pints of lager, 10 of Heavy, three Guinness and half-a-dozen halfs."

Famous folk from Shettleston are a little thin on the ground. Tommy Docherty, the gallus footballer and Scotland manager is one, and writer Cliff Hanley who actually always said he was from Sandyhills, a subsection of Shettleston. Glaswegians can sometimes be very definite about the vague boundaries of areas in the city. I remember Cliff writing about dating a girl from Mosspark on Glasgow's south side. By the time he got the last tram from Mosspark into the city centre, the last tram to Shettleston had already gone, and he had to hoof it the last two to three miles, and hoof it rather sharply through some of the more belligerent areas. The relationship didn't last.

Sports commentator and writer Archie Macpherson has fond memories of his early years in Shettleston. He smiles when people describe him as successful, as he modestly points out that his uncle who started as a brickie ended up with a property in Monaco, and another uncle was a leading maker of religious programmes for television, so doesn't even see himself as the most successful member of his own family.

But he has a serious point. The Shettleston of his youth was an area where people with a thirst for knowledge filled the local library. People could better themselves through hard work and enterprise, but without forgetting the basic brotherhood they learned in the crowded tenements. You can tell Archie has a foundation of socialism in his makeup from his Shettleston youth, but he does confess that he once delivered leaflets for a Tory candidate in return for a MacCallum's - an ice cream cone smothered in raspberry sauce.

So the Commonwealth Games will leave, but hopefully the Shettleston Heritage Trail will continue. There is a guided tour that leaves Shettleston Station on Saturday at 11. Go on it and have a MacCallum's after. That really is part of Glasgow's heritage.