Introduction
WELCOME TO SOUTH WEST SCOTLAND!
In many ways this is a lost and forgotten area, an area of wild and weird beauty, a lonely area. Yet, with an incomparable variety of coast and hill, town and village, sea and hill loch, ancient and modern, it is surely the ideal holiday area. More accessible than the Highlands, it has much Highland scenery, a warmer climate and lower rainfall. The hills and forests contain a wide range of wild life; the light and reflections on the Solway coast have long been irresistible to artists; ancient chapels, abbeys and castles bring history to vivid life. The towns, especially on the coast, have everything possible in the way of entertainment. In sum, a superb holiday area.
But this book is not designed to attract you here, for you are here already! It is meant, instead, to suggest how you can get the best out of your stay. Inevitably, it presupposes that you travel by car. There is no other way of getting about these days. It was different in the not-so-distant past, but now public transport, except along the coastal strip, is virtually non-existent. Fortunately, there is a most excellent network of roads, and, more fortunate still, they are never really busy, even in the height of the holiday season. Unhappily, the lovely railway that used to run along the Solway Coast was demolished by the Mad Axe-Man (Dr Beeching) some years ago.
There is a series of suggested tours in this book. Perhaps these are not really necessary, for wherever you go, you will surely find places of great beauty and interest. However, the suggested tours ensure that you will miss but little during a holiday here.
Of course, this is a large area to cover. Therefore there are two sets of suggested tours, one starting at Ayr in the north, and the other at Castle Douglas in the south. They are all circular tours, though, and thus can be joined at any point.
There is no particular reason for starting the tours at Ayr and Castle Douglas, except that tours must start somewhere, and those two delightful towns are as good as anywhere else. But if you are staying in Stranraer, or Dumfries, or Girvan, or anywhere else in the area, you will still find the suggestions useful: you merely join the tours at a different point.
Perhaps ideally, to really make the best of a holiday in South West Scotland, one should have what the tourist industry calls a 'two-centre holiday', that is, stay for a while in one place, then move to another.
However, no roads, and thus no suggested tours, go into the real heart of the hills; the lovely and secret places demand that you visit them on foot.
Coming from the south, you hardly know that you have crossed a border into Scotland, and certainly there is nothing now to remind you of the bitterness of the past, when these border lands were fought over repeatedly down the centuries. Only the lovely old Border Ballads, beloved of every folk singer, are there to remind us. Those, and a host of castles, fortified houses and towers.
But perhaps the very emptiness of the land should alert us to the fact that this is a unique area. For hundreds of years this land on both sides of the Solway Firth was the scene of incessant battle and slaughter, nation against nation, family against family. While England and Scotland struggled bloodily over the centuries, each repeatedly burning, killing and plundering over the land, the people took to the hills, living as best they could, and dying when they must. As the great battles of nations passed into history, the people emerged, dazed and anachronistic, for they knew not the ways of peace, only the ways of war and pillage.
So the struggles continued, with each family - Armstrongs, Douglasses, Grahams, Maxwells and many more - engaged in furious and endless raids on cattle, land and wealth. Some flourished, but many died, and the land was desolate and empty.
Those days are past, but the memories remain. And the land is still empty and quiet, but lovely with a beauty hard to express, particularly if the visitor is aware of a bitter history.
Not so long ago, even the neighbouring English had rather peculiar views of the Scots and of Scotland. Horrifying glens and mountains, raging seas, savage people with barbaric customs. Even - although this was never proven - people with tails! It took the intrepid travels of those such as William Wordsworth, Dr Johnson and most particularly King George IV and Queen Victoria and the writings of Walter Scott to destroy those myths - even though others, more romantic and equally false, replaced them.
That great historian Charles Gibbon himself expressed some curious views. In his masterly Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he wrote that:
These [the Romans] masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.
Well, yes, but it was not only the deer which were chased over the heath by the 'naked barbarians': it was also the cream of the Roman armies. One whole crack Legion marched north from Hadrian's Wall and simply disappeared. To this day not one single trace of them has been discovered. Centurions, men, horses and baggage vanished, and only the naked barbarians knew where.
However British they might be, the Scots do see themselves as being different from the rest of the British people. Wherever they are, and however long settled in foreign parts, they retain an essential Scottishness and pride. This is reflected in the existence of innumerable Burns Clubs, St Andrew's Societies, Caledonian Clubs and Clan Societies throughout the world, and this nostalgia, it seems, is an inherited thing, for, far from dying out, these associations of expatriate Scots go on from strength to strength.
It must be remembered that, in the long and bitter struggle to retain national independence from England, Scotland was never conquered. It became part of the United Kingdom in 1707, but that was by Treaty, not by force of arms, and even today many Scots regard that Treaty as an act of abysmal treachery, perpetrated by venal leaders for their own profit. 'We're bought and sold for English gold - Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!' as Burns put it in one of his many songs about the Jacobite rebellions.
Perhaps the first real figure to appear out of the mists of secular history in the dark ages of Scotland was King Kenneth MacAlpin. In 844 AD he united the Scots and the Picts under his own leadership and successfully defended their territory against all the many roving hordes of central European tribes which wandered the land in those days.
This unity was shattered in 1069 when King Malcolm III married a Saxon, Margaret, a woman of rare strong will, who broke up the Celtic church, imposed feudal systems of landholding, and the use of English and French as court languages.
Gradually, over 200 years, the English influence grew, and finally, by marriage, the English crown had a reasonable claim on the Scottish throne. But this was too much even for the vacillating Scottish King John Balliol, and in 1296 the English invaded under Edward I whom the English know as 'The Hammer of the Scots', and the Scots as something quite different.
It was out of this struggle that William Wallace arose as a great leader, and after him Robert Bruce, who succeeded where Wallace gloriously failed. Robert Bruce welded his nation into a unity so strong that it defeated the English and lasted for 400 years.
Out of the victory of Bruce came the Declaration of Arbroath, a great, ringing statement which comes down the centuries;
For as long as one hundred of us shall remain alive we shall never in any way submit to the rule of the English, for it is not for glory alone we fight, for riches, or for honours, but for freedom, which no good man loses but with his life.
And so it was for 400 years, until the noble sentiments of Arbroath drowned in the inflow of gold and trade.
But enough of the past, although a little understanding of the country's history can only add to your pleasures in the present. And there is more to come in this Introduction to South West Scotland!
Because you are in Scotland, you can go on foot where you will, for the Scottish law of trespass is different from that of England. Naturally, you do not damage hedges, fences or crops, and if you do, may find yourself liable. And should you be carrying a fishing rod or a gun, that is a different kettle of fish (or dish of venison stew), for then you might be guilty of trespassing in pursuit of game.
Wherever you go in South West Scotland, you cannot easily escape the past, for it is all around you, and the deep, ice-gouged valleys have supported man for perhaps 10,000 years, from the Old Stone Age onwards. This was the land of the Galwyddel (Welsh: Stranger Gaels), and they left faint clues for us to wonder at - age-old stones, burial cairns and forts, relics of ancient religions and forgotten battles. They left us one of our names, too, for 'Galloway' is derived from Galwyddel.
Even today, there is a sense of isolation from the rest of Britain, and that has always been so. Warring clans, religious strife, agricultural revolution, gypsies, coastal raiders and smugglers have left us a wealth of historical associations, with a wonderful and diverse heritage of buildings and sites.
The whole area is bestrewn with pre-historic monuments, Roman forts, Dark Age...
