This grumble and others one need not make in Galloway, where strangers not too pock-puddingish about being “done well,” would find a hearty welcome and openings for exploring a country sacred through memories of patriots and martyrs, dotted with ruined shrines and with strongholds of Douglases, Kennedys, Gordons, who in their lifetime loved better to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak. From Newton-Stewart, not yet wide awake to its capabilities as a tourist centre, one has half a day’s walk northwards into the heart of the Galloway Highlands, where Merrick raises its heathery Pentedactylon above the lovely Glen and Loch of Trool, one of the fastnesses of Bruce’s Wanderjähre. Another goal in these hills is Murray’s Monument, commemorating one of Scotland’s gifted herd-loons, who with homely schooling raised himself to be Doctor of Divinity and Professor of Oriental Languages. Three heights in Galloway bear the name of Cairnsmore, the highest Cairnsmore of Carsphairn, approached from the town of New Galloway by Loch Ken, Kenmure Castle, and the beautiful Glenkens. Passing beyond Carsphairn to Dalmellington, we can strike by rail into the native country of Burns, who at the Galloway spa of Lochenbreck wrote down his “Scots wha hae,” meetly composed by him, it is said, on a wild ride through a stormy night.
The chief town of Galloway is Stranraer, port of the shortest sea-crossing to Belfast, by Loch Ryan; but the nearest point to Ireland is Portpatrick, where that saint could step across the Channel long before so much money had been sunk on an abandoned harbour. The lion of Portpatrick is the glen and ruin of Dunskey; as that of Stranraer the grounds of Castle Kennedy, nursing exotics that attest the mildness of this western shore. The Irish express trains dash also past the beauties of Glenluce and its ruins haunted by legends of Michael Scott the Wizard, of Peden the Covenanting prophet, and of that hapless Bride of Lammermoor, whose story seems to have been distorted as well as transplanted to the other side of the country. Luce Bay separates the Mull of Galloway from a broader promontory in which the lochs of Mochrum are perhaps the finest nook. Its southern point is the green “Isle” of Whithorn, where Scottish Christianity was planted by St. Ninian; and still stand fragments of the famous monastery sought by James of the Iron Belt, and many another penitential pilgrim. On the same branch line from Newton-Stewart, Wigtown rears above its bay a monument of that shamefullest tragedy of the Covenanting persecutions, when two women martyrs were fastened to stakes to be drowned by the tide. At the mouth of the Cree is Creetown, “Portanferry” of Guy Mannering, from which can be visited caves fit to shelter Dirck Hatteraick, and the ruins of Barholm, that claims to be “Ellangowan,” and to have given concealment to John Knox. Gatehouse of Fleet is a picturesque place in the district illustrated by the Faed brothers’ pictures, and sanctified by the preaching of Samuel Rutherford. Farther east, on its inlet, is reached the county town Kirkcudbright, church of St. Cuthbert, who would hardly know his own name as now pronounced Kirkoobry. Here we have an interesting museum of Galloway antiquities; and a few miles off is Dundrennan Abbey, poor Mary’s last resting place in her troubled kingdom, whence she gave herself to the mercy of Elizabeth after her flight from Langside. The Kirkcudbright branch takes us back to the main line at Castle Douglas, near which stands the grim tower of a stronghold whose lords were once a terror to their own country, while over the Border English nurses would hush babes to rest with—
Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret ye:
The Black Douglas shall na’ get ye!
Like too many other noble Scottish names, this one has sadly degenerated, its last exploit to be proud of ending in the catastrophe that cut short Lord Francis Douglas’s life on the first ascent of the Matterhorn; and his brother, the late Marquis of Queensberry, made some stir in the world, least unenviably perhaps by the Queensberry rules of boxing. Several members of the family have in modern days come to an obscurely tragic end, as if urged by the Nemesis of forgotten bloodshed. Their chief title, the Dukedom of Queensberry, had passed to the house of Buccleuch, along with the princely seat of Drumlanrig in Nithsdale.
The oldest bridge in Scotland leads over the Nith to the largest town of the southern counties, out of Galloway in the letter, but not in the spirit. Dumfries, originally the fastness of Frisian pirates whose stock would “go far,” is set among famous sites and relics. In the Church of its Greyfriars, Bruce stabbed the Red Comyn, a deed “made siccar” by an ancestor of the Empress of the French. Near the town are the remains of Lincluden Abbey, “ruins yet beauteous in decay.” To the south, on the Galloway side of the estuary, Criffel’s cone rises above the walls of Sweetheart Abbey, built by John Baliol’s widow as tomb in which her husband’s heart should lie upon her own. On the opposite side stands another stately ruin, Caerlaverock Castle, where in the churchyard lies “Old Mortality,” as “Jeanie Deans” rests at Irongray. To the north is Lochmaben, the castle, perhaps the birthplace, of Robert Bruce. But the name that first rises to memory in this Nithsdale countryside is Robert Burns, tenant of Ellisland under that Dalswinton laird for whom is claimed the honour of the earliest steamboat experiments. Bruce, possibly born at Turnberry Castle on the Carrick coast, may have been an Ayrshire man like Burns, who came to end his broken life at Dumfries, now counting itself honoured by the sepulchre of one who thus wrote his own epitaph—