NINE
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing Stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds, austere and pure!
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, To S. R. Crockett (1895)
YOU GET OVER having the breath taken from you by haunting scenery worthy of the Hebrides or Cornwall, then you round a headland and there’s something even more picturesque: this is the Scottish Riviera, an appellation dreamed up by an anonymous copywriter of the 1930s. During his Voyage Around Great Britain Richard Ayton likened Galloway to Caernarvonshire. When John Keats toured in 1818, he called it ‘very beautiful, very wild with craggy hills somewhat in the Westmorland fashion. The county is very rich, very fine, and with a little of Devon.’ For the Rev. C. H. Dick, a Galloway minister, who wrote Highways and Byways of Galloway and Carrick (1916), it had something of Bavaria about it.
Today two ravens patrol one of Keats’s ‘craggy hills’. We hear them on the scree before we spot them tumbling and rushing. For me their call is closer to a quack than a croak. A gronk? Scottish gamekeepers nearly pushed them to extinction to safeguard pheasants, grouse and other birds which people pay to shoot for ‘sport’. In some areas pheasants are almost tame and, therefore, easier to kill. The lobbying power of the new gentry is such that they are fast turning some beautiful parts of Scotland into private playgrounds. More than four thousand ravens were ‘culled’ in Scotland between January 2015 and July 2018.
The Norwegians revered ravens as wise messengers, prophets and protectors. Not so in Scotland, where a flock of ravens is, unkindly, called an ‘unkindness’ possibly because of their association with the macabre. The ravens we see today swirl above Screel, which affords a spectacular panorama that would quicken the unkindest of hearts.
We spot the wind-whipped skeleton of a tree downhill from Screel; something extremely macabre happened there – one of the most spine-chilling episodes in the annals of Scottish demonology. There are records of a vicious poltergeist, which hounded a family here for three months in 1695. It hurled rocks, slapped several people, made objects move, and finally burned the farmstead of Ringcroft of Stocking Hill down. In 1957, Tom Phin, who once edited the Galloway News, wrote in The Scots Magazine of ‘a row of trees conspicuous on the sky-line near Auchencairn. The trees, reduced from four to three by a recent storm, grow from the site of the cottage, the foundations of which are still there.’
More than 60 years after Phin’s piece only one of the so-called Ghost Trees remains, and it’s hard to find the foundations of the building. The first O.S. map showed it as ‘Ring, a ruin’, on ‘Stocking Hill’, but there is no mention of either on recent maps. There’s a local rumour that the poltergeist will return if the last tree dies.
Alexander Telfair, the local minister, published the story of the poltergeist in a pamphlet authenticated by several ministers and elders, some of whom spent the night on the farm:
‘It came often with such force upon the house that it made all the walls to shake, it broke a hole through the timber and thatch of the house and poured in great stones.’
The Saturday Review, albeit many years later, denounced the pamphlet as a practical joke – propaganda against atheism. And Sacheverell Sitwell, in his book, Poltergeists, dismissively reckoned one of Mackie’s children had mastered the art of ventriloquism!
A ventriloquist would twist his tongue throwing some of the placenames of this district, many of which have Norse, Viking, Gaelic and Scots etymology. And although the maps of the Solway coast have dropped many evocative place names and features, there is still a lexicon of strange nomenclature that harks back to old-world customs and characters. Torrs Warren, Peter’s Paps, the Gauger’s Loup, the Doukers’ Bing, Adam’s Chair, Lot’s Wife. It could almost be a poem. Spouty Dennans, Witchwife’s Haven, Raven’s Nest, Thunderhole Bay, Rascarrel Moss.
Wealthy Kippford across the bay, whose lone hawthorn was voted Britain’s best tree in 2021, didn’t appear on any map until 1750. Ayton observed during his wanderings there that he was now in ‘a very rude and unfrequented part of the country where a traveller was an object of some curiosity’. The village had once been called Scaur. Samuel Murdoch Crosbie, under the byline, Scauronian, wrote in the Kirkcudbrightshire Advertiser & Galloway News, in 1923: ‘Within living memory the Scaur has changed from an out of the world little hamlet of some eighteen cottages, most of them thatched, to a thriving little village of more than double the number of dwellings. In those earlier days the Scaur was cut off from the outside world by the tide for a portion of each day as the only road into it was along the beach, which was covered twice every 24 hours. There was no post office, there were three public houses, there was no shop worthy of the name and, generally speaking, the village was considered to be quite a century behind the times.’
However, the nearby ancient hill fort of the Mote of Mark on the summit of a low hill by the estuary testifies to ancient occupation.
Many Galloway beaches are a pleasure to see and explore, but three of the five of Scotland’s 85 tested beaches that failed European safe-bathing standards in 2021, are around here: Brighouse Bay, Dhoon Bay and Rockcliffe. That this can happen in a designated National Scenic Area nicknamed the Riviera is appalling. Testers even found traces of human faeces. The water quality at Rockcliffe was rated ‘poor’ for four consecutive years. It’s high time slurry spreading was banned, too. What happened to good old-fashioned, weathered cow shit?
Ruins are uplifting. They have energy; their grandness cuts you down to size. Dundrennan Abbey has survived since the 12th century, despite the iconoclasts of the Reformation. This peaceful sylvan location appealed to the Cistercian ideal, described by Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx as: ‘Everywhere peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world.’
In 1839 the blunt Cockburn castigated landowners again for dereliction, for using historic buildings as cow sheds:
‘They gaze on the glorious ruins of noble buildings, over which time and history delight to linger, and which give their estates all the dignity they possess, with exactly the same emotion that the cattle do, to which these impressive edifices are generally consigned. It is a humiliating, national scandal.’
On May 15th, 1568 Mary Queen of Scots spent her last night on Scottish soil at Dundrennan, probably in the commendator’s house; next morning, she boarded a fishing boat bound for Workington in England, for imprisonment and eventual execution.
Jackdaws nest in the abbey heights today, opposite a raucous rookery. A nuthatch whistles from the ivy thatch, and wagtails dart about the grass foreground this side of the unsightly ring of railings erected to keep us out. It is temporarily closed to the public, pending close tactile inspection of every stone. But it’s not just Dundrennan Abbey that is subject to closure. A goodly swathe of the coast is often a no-go area to allow the military to practise shooting and blowing things up. We might very well be on the wonderful Scottish Riviera, but 20 tons of depleted uranium shells have been rocketed into the sea from Dundrennan: land acquired by the Army in 1942 on which to train forces for the liberation of Europe. There is now a danger area 15 miles by 19 miles.
Gulls and waders congregate in their cacophonous thousands on the guano-blotched crags of Hestan Island, which is only accessible along a cockleshell causeway. An hour before low tide the occasional human walks across to this 33-acre island, which was one of the settings of Samuel Rutherford Crockett’s book The Raiders, although Crockett called it Rathan. Smugglers from the Isle of Man hid their contraband in a shelved cave that is now colonised by washed-up tree trunks, plastic debris, sand, spiders and pigeons. The Rev. Beryl Scott and her husband lived for years in a former copper miner’s house on the island without mains water, electricity or gas. They built church organs. Edward Balliol, former king of Scotland, also exiled himself to Hestan and built a manor house there more than a century after the monks of Dundrennan had come to fish. You must know the tides before crossing to Hestan from Almorness Point. Tobias Smollett wrote in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) that the Solway sand was ‘quick in different places’ and the tide ‘rushes in so impetuously, that passengers are often overtaken by the sea.’ And Walter Scott warned in Redgauntlet: ‘He that dreams on the bed of the Solway may wake in the next world.’
Crockett set much of his work in his native Galloway, including The Black Douglas, which Tolkien credited as an inspiration. Although Crockett sometimes rearranged the geography of Galloway, and in fact enlarged the cave on Hestan, he described the area vividly. ‘There were many tales about these caves,’ he wrote in The Raiders. ‘They were miles long, according to the ignorant. They were inhabited by the most terrible of sea-beasts, by mermen and sea lions of fearsome presence and exceeding ferocity.’
