You can see five kingdoms from here: Scotland, where we’re standing; England over there, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and the kingdom of Heaven up there
THE REV. ANDREW PATTERSON, during a walk with the author along a Wigtownshire promontory in 1987, as quoted in the Irish News and The Herald
WITH ITS MANY drumlin hills the gorse-glad Machars peninsula of Galloway has a gentle, timeless beauty; and for me Lord Cockburn was winding readers up when he rated the Solway ‘the stupidest of all firths’ with few rocks, no islands and ‘no edging of picturesque mountains’. He wrote: ‘For to point, as the natives always do, to the dim ghosts of some distant hills, of which only the outlines are visible, and to explain with an air of triumph, these are the English mountains, is mere stuff.’
A reincarnated Cockburn should chum me up Windy Hill to get some sense into him. Okay, at less than 100 yards high it’s a hillock, but, although the views of the Cumbrian peaks and those of the Isle of Man are not to be sniffed at, there is undoubtedly magical scenery to behold north of the border. From the summit of this hill that has Wigtown, Scotland’s National Book Town, below it, your payback is an expansive swathe of hills; and the copses, coves, cliffs, bays, lochs, standing stones, forts, cairns, and tumbledown ruins, of these firth lands. You can take in the bay’s nature reserve and, if you are lucky, spot an osprey. In 2004 the first pair in a century visited Galloway and liked it. Wigtown now has CCTV cameras linked to an osprey’s nest.
Wigtownshire was Covenanting country during the ‘Killing Times’. Covenanters were either freedom-fighters battling against absolute rule by bishops, or theocrats worthy of the Taliban, who wanted a fundamentalist Scotland. You could argue either case, if you had the time and inclination. An obelisk on a lower contour of Windy Hill remembers two covenanting martyrs, Margaret Maclaughlan and Margaret Wilson, who were tied to stakes in Wigtown Bay on May 11th, 1685, and drowned as the tide advanced. A commission had condemned them as Presbyterian activists, and a pardon, issued in Edinburgh on April 30th, was ignored.
According to the records of the parish of Kirkinner, MacLaughlan’s head was ‘held down within the water by one of the town officers by his halberd at her throat, til she died’. Storytellers say he had an unquenchable thirst for the rest of his life. In History of the Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway (1864), Sir Andrew Agnew, stated:
‘If going on an errand his unnatural craving obliged him to carry a huge pitcher on his back; if he crossed a stream, even before ribald companions he was irresistibly compelled to kneel down and, like the men chosen by Gideon, to lap water like a dog.’
Karma may also have dealt with the constable, Bell, who had tied the victims to the stakes. He had three sons born with webbed feet. Agnew observed:
‘We have a female relative, aged 92 years, who assures us that she has seen three of Cleppie Bell’s descendants in the district, who were all afflicted with this deformity of the fingers and toes.’
Provost Coltrane, who had been a ‘witch tester’, and was chief magistrate at the execution, was commonly said to have sold his soul to the devil. According to J Maxwell Wood in Witchcraft and Superstitious Record in the Southwestern District of Scotland, when he died in 1708, the windows of his house looked as if they were on fire, and for long afterwards his ghost, a terrifying figure, walked the earth, snorting fire from its nostrils. Even the house where he lived and died was for many years avoided after nightfall. When kirk sessions put adulterers in neck manacles and sackcloth, publicly humiliated Sabbath-breakers, and hanged petty thieves, it was a fitting end to a Holy Willie who had lurked on the streets looking for drinkers to punish.
That simmer’s day the king’s dragoons hung three men
Fae the gibbets fur no renouncin their hatred o bishops,
An twae Mairgarets wur mairtyred tae the ocean –
fixit ticht tae stakes tae droon as the tide rose abune the bay o Wigtown.
They were aw merkit oot as malaperts, troublemakers
whae listent tae meenisters preach frae beneath their blankets
in amang the hills o Gallowa’,
Loth even in the face o daith itsel tae stoap bein the foot sodgers o god:
freedom fechters railin against Episcopalianism
Mairgaret Maclauchlan an Mairgaret Wilson wir laid oot
on the mudflats at Bladnoch, clingin oan tae their crates like crabs.
Yin o them sang hymns but the sat watter dried them in her mooth.
An offecial pullt her heid up, giein hur a last chance tae recant her creed
but she speired instead fur a gless o watter.
There’s plenty o watter there fur ye, said he,
an pushed her back unner.
It’s said he’d a son, whae was born wi webbed feet.
Luckin fittit his hale life, he wuz, an aye thirsty forby.
(From The Magician’s House by Andy Murray, 2023)
The Machars has a myriad of antiquities: cup and ring markings, old homesteads, and standing stones. Three miles west of Wigtown on a bank of the river Bladnoch stands Torhouse, the reputed burial place of the mysterious king Calgacus, who fought against the Roman invasion and is mentioned in Tacitus’s Agricola. It is one of the best-preserved stone circles in Scotland.
Down the eastern flank of the Machars sits Garlieston which, because of its similarity to Normandy, was the location of the top-secret Mulberry Harbour project that prepared troops for D-Day. Secluded Cruggleton Bay, one of the most pleasing beaches along the Solway, is a sheltered arc of sand fringed by mature trees, a short stroll from Galloway House, the ancient seat of the earls of Galloway. To the south on an outcrop of shale are the crumbling remains of Cruggleton Castle, known by locals as the Arch or the Black Rock of Cree. An arch is all that is left of an English garrison from the time of Robert the Bruce.
Ninian built Scotland’s first recorded church, Candida Casa, at Whithorn around 400 AD, and spread Christianity across Scotland. He was described by Blaeu’s Atlas in 1662 as ‘A tutelary god in the furthest corner of Galloway, whither of old men from distant parts undertook pilgrimages, for the sake of religion, to see the relics & church of Ninian, and to carry away a portion of sacred dust, which was in these days considered a signal evidence of sanctity.’
James IV made several pilgrimages to the cradle of Christianity after his queen recuperated from ill health following a visit to the shrine. I thought my haversack was heavy, but the royal couple didn’t travel light. In Wigtown and Whithorn Historical and Descriptive Sketches (1877) Gordon Fraser stated: ‘It would appear that in this journey the queen travelled in a litter, sometimes called in the treasurers’ books the “Quenis chariot.” Seventeen horses were required to carry her majesty’s wardrobe and baggage.’
According to the eighth-century Miracula Nynie Episcopi, Ninian ‘studied heavenly wisdom with a devoted mind in a cave of horrible blackness’. There is a stimulating cliff-top walk to this much-visited cave from Whithorn’s neighbour, the Isle of Whithorn, which is not an island, but an old fishing port on a headland near to which cruel Coltrane had a farm. Seven crosses are cut into the face on its west side. Eighteen stone memorials and crosses that were found there are now in the museum at Whithorn Priory.
The finale of the 1972 cult film, The Wicker Man, was shot here and at the dramatic Burrow Head, where Sergeant Howie, played by Edward Woodward, was burned at the stake within an enormous wooden structure, as the pagan villagers danced and chanted. The remains of the wickerman’s legs were visible for many years but were eventually moved.
John Kincaid McNeillie, who was brought up in the Machars, left a legacy of more than 40 books, including a number of cult classics, such as The Wigtown Ploughman, which follows the life of Andy Walker, the son of an abusive father. It was an exposé of the appalling living conditions of Scotland’s rural poor under ruthless landlords in Scotland in the 1930s. McNeillie also turned out weekly nature journalism in Country Life. One wonders what he would have made of one Dale Maclauchlan, a roofer, who shelled out £5,500 in 2021 for a jetski to meet his girlfriend in the Isle of Man in contravention of COVID lockdown regulations. Maclaughlan set off from the Isle of Whithorn on a 27-mile trip to Ramsey. The media called him ‘the jetski Romeo’ but the courts weren’t impressed: he was jailed for four weeks. He recalled: ‘One minute I was staring at the sky going up a six-foot wave and the next I was staring down into the abyss. The water was black and was getting in my eyes and mouth. But the thought of Jessica kept me driving on.’
Due west is another cave that was once inhabited, along from startling sand dunes at St Medan’s beach, from where the views across Luce Bay to the Mull of Galloway are superb. We stand now on a ‘go stargazing’ site, chosen for its pristine, open dark skies.
‘Och, I wish I was back in ma ain wee cave’, Johnny Logie told the Sunday Post in April 1958 when he was in hospital with pneumonia. Logie, a former Ayrshire miner with hearing and sight problems from a pit fall, had lived in Sheep Cave for 30 years, gathering all the furniture he needed from driftwood, and collecting rainwater. He practised his own version of the good life, was renowned for his seaweed-fed vegetables, and was virtually self-sufficient. He died in 1962, although there were signs a few years ago that his cave was often visited: stacked kindling, an upturned drum with a candle on top, a bed made from pallets, and fish crates for seats.
The naturalist and writer Gavin Maxwell, who is famous for Ring of Bright Water, was also a seeker of solitude but was no cave-dweller. He was born near Port William; his mother was a daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, and his father was heir to the Galloway baronetcy. A life-size bronze otter sits on top of a rock overlooking Luce Bay as a memorial to Maxwell, whose blue-blooded forebears founded the village of Port William, but don’t get so laid-back by the tranquillity that you chat to the man who forever leans against a wooden fence looking out to sea. He won’t reply: he’s another statue cast in bronze. In front of him there is a plaque with the first verse of the poem Leisure by W. H. Davies:
‘What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?’
Twelfth-century Glenluce Abbey is worthy of stares: it stands in magnificent disrepair in the north-west of the Machars, surrounded by pastureland and lapped by the meandering River Luce. There is a peculiar theory published in MacTaggart’s Gallovidian Encyclopedia that one of the abbey’s vaults (evidently long-buried) contained the library of Michael Scot, the wizard:
‘Here are thousands of old witch songs and incantations, books of the ‘Black Art,’ and ‘Necromancy,’ ‘Philosophy of the Devil,’ ‘Satan’s Almanacks,’ ‘The Fire Spangs of Faustus,’ ‘The Soothsayers’ Creed,’ ‘The Witch Chronicle,’ and the ‘Black Clud’s Wyme laid open,’ with many more valuable volumes.’
In the 16th century Gilbert Kennedy paid a monk to forge a signature on the title documents of Glenluce Abbey, then paid an assassin to murder the monk. He duly hanged the assassin for the murder.
The abbey stands on the banks of the Water Luce. In 1836 Sir James Hay of Park formed an islet in the river just before it reaches the sea.
When his son, Captain, later Admiral, Dalrymple Hay returned from visiting St. Helena, he named the island Helena and planted willows from cuttings of the tree at Napoleon’s grave. The willows are still there.
