File:The Braes o' Bonull (stone relief) - geograph.org.uk - 974462.jpg

English: The Braes o' Bonull (stone relief) This artwork can be found in Bonhill, on the outside wall of the Veterans Bowling Club in George Street. Although there is no explanation of it to be found at the site, it represents the chorus of an old song called "The Braes o' Bonull" [i.e. Bonhill], whose complete words can be found at http://www.valeofleven.org.uk/valesongsandpoems.html

All of the elements mentioned in the chorus appear in the artwork; even the bull is visible in the background, at the upper right. As for the whole song, the sole obscure reference in it is to "The Slunger": this was the name of a local road, now long gone, whose course more or less corresponded with that of the modern Northfield Road; see the following, under the heading "Slunger": http://www.valeofleven.org.uk/scottishplacenames/Svale_names.html

Northfield Road, mentioned above, begins just north of the location shown in the photo, on the other side of Main Street (which is shown in red on the map), and runs NNE past the club house of a golf course. The road was once called Slunger Hill Road, a name that is connected to the textile industry that was once prominent in that area (as I learned from an exhibition on that industry). To "slunge" or "slounge" meant, in Old Scots, to "souse with water", and it was an activity that was carried out in the local bleachfields.

Finally, note that "Bonull", as used in the song, is not a corruption of the present-day form "Bonhill", as might be thought. It is, in fact, an older form of the same place-name; the name Bonhill does not really refer to a hill. Other old spellings ("Bullul" and "Buchnul") are preserved in charters of the Earls of Lennox, while the Atlas of Scotland (as mapped by Timothy Pont in the 1580s and 1590s, but published by Joan Blaeu in 1654) shows the "Kirk of Binnuill".