Galloway Retold with Angela Miller - Stravaiging in the Glenkens

For the last few months I’ve been working with Jo from the CatStrand and Andy Kaye, of the YouTube channel Stravaiging with Andy, on some exciting Cultural Glenkens projects.

Andy and I did a talk together at the CatStrand, which you can now see on both of our YouTube channels. The talk covers three walks in the Glenkens that between them will take you from Carsphairn to Mossdale, with an excursion around Waterside Hill in-between. While Andy mostly covers the routes and the practicality of walking them, I cover the history you will walk through on your way. There’s so much history to cover in those walks - too much to fit into one wee article - but I’ll give you a brief rundown, to tempt you into watching the video of the talk!

We start in Carsphairn with it’s unusual founding story, then head out of the village to Bardennoch Hill, past the War Memorial and then Cairn Avel, the prehistoric burial mound on the side of the hill there. The views over to Woodhead are so good from there, and I give a brief history of the Woodhead lead mines, before we head up onto the Pack Road properly, which was used by pedlars, pilgrims and smugglers over the centuries before we invented the car.

We then pass the site of the Pilgrim Stones that were carved by people travelling to Whithorn and Saint Ninian’s Cave, heading down into Polmaddy village, which used to cater to all of those weary travellers and was also the site of an escapade of Robert the Bruce during the Wars of Independence.

The next walk takes us around Waterside Hill, encompassing the Galloway Hydro Scheme and it’s history in the talk, but also following in the footsteps of Adam Forester from Midtown, Dalry, to the Witches' Score (see Issue 145 of the Gazette for the story of Adam Forester on BBC Landward). We also encounter the terrible Witch of Hanniston and the Grey Lady of Glenlee on this walk, so it does take a bit of a supernatural bent!

The last walk begins at the CatStrand in New Galloway, a building with some history to it. We go out past the golf course then onto the track that winds its way along the side of the Bennan Hill, past Kenmure Castle. There’s the history of the forestry itself to be encountered here, but also, of course, a brief history of Kenmure Castle. As we rise up high above Loch Ken, you get an amazing view of the Loch and on all the way past Screel to the coast, and one of the things you can see clearly from up there is the islands in the loch. They might be beautiful, but at least one of them has a very dark history that I touch on in the talk.

Finally, we continue along the forestry track until we get down to the Raider’s Road, which gave me an opportunity to talk about local author SR Crockett, and then to the railway viaduct at Loch Stroan, where I finished off the talk with the subject of the old Portpatrick Line.

As you can see, even a brief description covers a lot of history! If you want to know more, I definitely suggest you get yourself onto YouTube (see below) and have a watch.

And that brings me to a bit of an announcement! Andy and I are about to start a podcast called Talking Galloway, where we will be exploring everything we can about Galloway, and talking to guests who live in, work in or simply have a deep love of our beautiful part of the world.

We’re aiming to have the first episode out soon, but I recommend you follow either me or Andy on Facebook (we both have Facebook pages – Stravaiging With Andy and Galloway Retold respectively) to know exactly when it’s coming out. Our first guest will be Jo from the CatStrand.

Angela Miller is the librarian at Dalry Library and a keen local historian.