EIGHT
‘Huge Criffel’s hoary top ascends
By Skiddaw seen,
Neighbours we were, and loving friends
We might have been.’
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, At the Grave of Burns (1803)
THE BUS TRUNDLES into Dumfries, picks us up, and takes us west, out past the entrance road to Kirkconnell House, the oldest continuously inhabited house in Scotland, which was in the Maxwell family until 2000. The original mansion was granted to that powerful clan in the 13th century. One previous laird was Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s aide-de-camp at the Battle of Culloden. The 1760 extension is thought to be Scotland's oldest brick house. The house itself is now a very upmarket holiday home.
Soon larks rise like little helicopters above the changeling hill Criffel, which seems to rise straight out of the Solway Firth. Below Criffel stands ivied Sweetheart Abbey, which is caressed by spring-evening-pink sunlight; it was built by Lady Devorgilla, the lovelorn widow of Lord John Balliol. When he died in 1268, she had his heart embalmed in an ivory casket and carried it everywhere with her. When she too died, in 1289, she was laid to rest in front of the altar, clutching her husband’s heart to her forever.
Bravo to Scotland’s Tacitus, Lord Cockburn, a 19th-century circuit judge and later Lord Advocate, for noting with exasperation in his fascinating Circuit Journeys (1839) that the abbey had been sold in the 1810s to be demolished for dyking material:
‘I grieve to say that another specimen of our unworthiness to possess such relics is to be found in the disgraceful state in which it is kept. It is a byre. Beasts.’
(However, Cockburn later purchased Bonaly, south-west of Edinburgh, and demolished much of the village to improve views from his new house! There is no record of what became of the inhabitants of the village.)
Peter Kormylo, a retired head teacher, was as creative as the stone thieves had been destructive. He spent 10 years renovating the Abbot’s Tower, a 16th-century building that had stood roofless for 400 years:
‘I have been interested in towers since I was a child when I liked castles, spiral staircases and dungeons. ...I scoured Dumfries and Galloway for three years and eventually came across one that was on a farmer’s land.....
‘I sank every copper of my life savings into it...it’s a punter-built tower, an ordinary bloke sinking all that he had into architectural conservation.’
Abbot’s Tower was built in 1540 and Gilbert Broun, the last abbot, lived in it for nearly 50 years. It stood empty after it was burned during the Reformation. Broun had defended Catholicism and planned to march on Dumfries if the Spanish armada landed at Kirkcudbright. The ships didn’t come. Broun fled to France and eventually died of a gangrenous foot, aged 103.
The only travellers on the bus today, a family in flipflops and sunglasses, sit solemnly up the aisle, rubber buckets and spades protruding from their carrier bags. Fifty years ago, any bus to Southerness would have been packed fit to topple, as it was a popular spot for weekenders, but human traffic seems sparse now. The descendants of those bygone passengers may well be packing airports en route to the Mediterranean, although staycations have increased in popularity since the coronavirus pandemic.
Between the villages of Kirkbean and Southerness there was once a medieval settlement that had its own jail and courts. The lost village of Preston was probably a ‘burgh of regality’ that belonged to the Regent Morton during the 16th century. By 1795, when the Statistical Account was published, there were only three farmers in Preston; the New Statistical Account counted only one inhabitant in 1844. The freestone Preston market cross toppled shortly afterwards but was later unearthed and placed on a granite plinth. The age of the cross, which now has ivy twining up it, is unknown. There is a tale told of the young James VI visiting a poor local family when he lodged with the Regent at the nearby Castle of Wraiths (now Wreaths). He was fed flounders by a poor family nearby. They filleted the fish, to make them look like two – one brown, one white. The king expressed a preference for the white ones. All that is left of this historical building, which had four storeys, are fragments of the southern and eastern walls, and the remnants of a turnpike stair and doorway.
Our bus rattles past a championship golf course, above which a buzzard quarters for young voles. I hear the soft whistle of waders, and the word ‘fore’ being yelled. Here in Southerness the Vikings established saltpans that were later run by monks. (It was originally called Satterness but, like so many other places, its name was anglicised.) The second lighthouse to be built in Scotland stands on the skerries opposite the pub, the Paul Jones, which was named after a pirate who became an admiral in both the American and Russian navies. Jones was born in a cottage on nearby Arbigland estate, which is now a museum, on the next block from a caravan park that wouldn’t look out of place in Blackpool.
Southerness was founded on blood money by a man described by the Dictionary of National Biography as a ‘peacemaker’. Richard Oswald owned Bunce Island, a slave fort in Sierra Leone in West Africa, and was responsible for capturing around 13,000 Africans and transporting them to slavery in the plantations of America and the Caribbean. He trousered an estimated £60 million in today’s money from this ‘trade’ and, when slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833, his son was awarded compensation of £5,645 18s 6d for the loss of the 297 slaves he owned jointly with his wife in Jamaica. Such a scenario was not unfamiliar among the Scottish upper classes of that time, and many huge estates were built on the back of slavery.
From Southerness lighthouse you can turn left or right into superlatives. On the right are the wide sands of Mersehead that sweep towards the well-heeled and entirely double-yellow-lined village of Sandyhills, along from geological miracles such as the Needle’s Eye, Lot’s Wife, and the Piper’s Cave. On the landward side of this broad strand is a reserve run by the RSPB. Turn left at the lighthouse instead and you have an invigorating and varied walk over glistening sand and then through terrain redolent of fairy tales. I’m not a Krypton Factor fiend, nor am I into ‘bagging’ Munros or ticking off the many long-distance pathways that have been branded by committees. I’m more into communing with the elements and peering into corners. It may well be my natural laziness, but I’d rather watch the world happening than be an athlete who walks 30 miles a day and is hungry for another ordeal before he hits the hay.
Today Nikki and I jump around shell shores and scramble up, down, over and past jagged and water-smoothed rocks, and haphazardly folded limestone. Three cheers for the magic of sea air, the wonders of glaciation and seismic burps. Here is a whopper of a boulder called the Devil’s Stone. Lore tells us the devil bit a chunk out of Criffel, didn’t like the taste of it, and spat it out. The Thirlstane is the star of the show, a natural arch beloved by rock climbers and boulderers. There are children abseiling down it today. We dander among bluebells and a profusion of wild garlic as thick as a fresh fall of snow. We walk the meandering path by twisted trees and behold a gate flanked by two stone lions.
And here we have the House on the Shore, where an Oscar -nominated film, The Wife, starring Glenn Close, was filmed. James William Beauchamp Blackett is the laird. On the online blurb for Arbigland estate Blackett admits that his great-grandmother built the house in 1936 out of stones she obtained from demolishing part of the village of Carsethorn! He also boasts that the house is ‘one of the most architecturally important houses to be built in Scotland in the 20th Century’.
Blackett, a regular commentator on the GB news channel, co-founded a fervently anti-Scottish-independence party with George Galloway, a presenter on the now proscribed Russia Today channel. He parted company with Galloway after Putin invaded Ukraine. Both were concerned that Scotland was being ‘ulsterised’.
Blackett was the keynote speaker at a public meeting in 2024 which opposed the imminent designation of Galloway as a national park. He was quoted as saying: ‘We live in a 21st-century Scotland run by socialists and separatists from Central Belt-istan. And Dumfries and Galloway is a client of Central Belt-istan.’ National parks, he declared, were the preserve of ‘the NIMBY tendency and environment tendency’.
Blackett’s father, Captain ‘Beachie’ Blackett, an ill-starred Lloyds name, acquired Ashdowns, a purveyor of fine fish, oysters and game, in London in 1966. For more than 30 years he presided over his business wearing a straw hat, a bow tie and rubber boots. He opened a restaurant, Beauchamp’s, above the shop, and above that a private luncheon club. When business was bad, Blackett had a tendency to parade up and down the street wearing a sandwich board that declared on the front, ‘The End of the World is Nigh But …’ and on the back, ‘Beauchamp’s is Still Open for Lunch’. The world did come to an end for his business. It went under in 1999.
When you see sensible-looking folk in anoraks walking their pets along the pebble beach at Carsethorn, due south, it’s almost impossible to believe that this village once had five pubs and three brothels. It swarmed with industry, and boats left its jetty regularly for Liverpool and beyond. Convicts were marched along the cobbled causeway and shepherded onto vessels bound for Australia. Some 22,000 people, facing famine, depression and recession, sailed voluntarily. In 1872 the whole hamlet of Busy Bit, near Dunscore in Dumfriesshire, moved to Sydney, and the Clydesdale horses they took with them were reportedly Australia’s first. The jetty, now a jagged lattice of half-sunken sticks, recently declared an ancient monument, is visible from the beer garden of the Steamboat, which is now the only pub in the village. As far as I’m aware there are no brothels.