#killintringan

[scots-gallivanter]

TWELVE

I spied a rickety ladder leading up to the loft. Climbing up, I found myself looking out of a broken skylight at the vast expanse of Luce Bay with the Mull of Galloway stretching into the distance. I shouted down to Bill: ‘This is where we are going to live.’

TESSA KNOTT SINCLAIR, owner of Glenwhan Gardens

NATURE PROBABLY INTENDED the Mull of Galloway to be an island but decided against it at the last minute. This lofty, precipitous headland, landlocked by an isthmus, is none the worse for it, however. It has a rare island feel about it that switches clock time off, so that a watch means as much as a hill of beans. Even the onomatopoeic placenames may soothe: Mary Wilson’s Slunk, Sheep Hank, Stinking Bight, Nick of Kingdom, Lagantulluch, Muldaddie, Cairnie Finnart, Scarty Head and Killantringan. We tramp the beach at West Tarbet, only a few hundred yards from East Tarbet, although the two might be on different planets. On the west we have sheer cliffs hammered by waves, while East Tarbet is less dramatic and greener.

On the eastern side, on Mull farm, at the foot of a cliff that faces Luce Bay, is the oldest ecclesiastical building in Galloway, the medieval Chapel of St Medana, partly built out of a cave. Nearby are the Chapel wells, which are filled with sea water at high tide. Bathing in them as the sun rose on the first Sunday of May was considered a cure-all. Most of the parishioners would congregate there on ‘Co Sunday’ to bathe and leave gifts.

We fall in with David Green, an engineer, who is wild-camping on the western shore, and scuba diving. Disarmingly, he introduces himself as ‘a spectrum dweller’ and brings me back up to speed with our slipshod times: ‘There are so many idiots coming up from the northeast to fish off the rocks here. The first thing they do is build a fire and get their carry outs out. We had them here last night. At four in the morning the wind blew their pop-up tent down, so they just burned it. It has got really bad the last few years. They leave their mess everywhere.’

We discuss jetsam that was battered into a slippery crag years ago. David, who has dived around here for years, knows about it: a gigantic, rusting gas heat-exchanger, which fell off a ship some 15 years ago and has been left for the archaeologists of a future time to fight over, to supplement the wreck of a tanker that ran aground in gales near Killantringan lighthouse in 1982 and still sits, half-submerged.

We are at the southern end of the Rhins of Galloway, that 25-mile-long hammerhead peninsula you see on maps of western Scotland. The Rhins itself would have been an island but for the flat throat of land near Stranraer. The Mull, half a mile at the most from the tarbets, is where the peninsula juts into the Irish Sea: Scotland’s Land’s End, crowned by a lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather in 1830. Today we haven’t the foggiest where the lighthouse is. It’s pea soup: visibility is down to the length of your shadow. On a clear day there are spectacular views of Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Cumbria, and you can see thousands of gannets diving on the cliffs. The RSPB has a nature reserve there and porpoises and dolphins often swim in the sea below. Way beneath the lighthouse the currents of the Solway and the Clyde meet in a maelstrom. From what I hear a Galloway 'witch', spurned by a sailor, wove nine tides to entrap him at the Mull. But the sailor heard about her spell and always lugged his boat over the tarbet. He was never doomed but the spell is still in place today.

Creepier still is the true tale of three lighthouse keepers who vanished from their post at the remote Flannan islands in 1900. Their disappearance remains one of the most puzzling enigmas in maritime history. The unsolved mystery was the basis for The Vanishing, a 2018 film, starring Peter Mullan and Gerard Butler, much of which was shot at the Mull and up the western crags of the Rhins. The crew tidied the old lighthouse garden. With wood left over from the set, volunteers built raised beds and restored it to its former glory.

The Mull of Galloway became a public asset thanks to £300,000 from the Scottish Land Fund in 2013. The sale from the Northern Lighthouse Board included a community-run lighthouse museum, three letting cottages, coastal heathland and cliffs – not the lighthouse itself, whose foghorn has been painstakingly restored to functional order.

Picture-postcard Portpatrick was also the subject of a community buyout. It is the main village on the west coast of the Rhins with its pastel houses running down to a small harbour with a multitude of boats. There is a local tradition, but no documentary evidence to support it, that Peter the Great lodged overnight here in 1698.

A ferry service ran from Portpatrick to Donaghadee (the Dover of Ireland) on the coast of County Down for some 300 years until 1867. At its peak 80,000 people a year sailed the route. But strong westerly winds took their toll on Portpatrick pier. Traffic switched to the longer but safer route along Loch Ryan, from Stranraer to Larne. And in 1871 the lighthouse at Portpatrick was removed stone by stone and shipped to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

On July 3rd, 1834, the Caledonian Mercury wrote of an entrepreneur who dived for sunken treasures between Portpatrick and the Irish coast, describing it as 'a remarkable instance of ingenuity and enterprise': a new apparatus that allowed men to walk on the seabed: 'The people on the coast, envying him his rich harvest, have come off in boats and impeded his labour by throwing stones and other missiles, to his vexation, annoyance and interruption.'

The Mercury added: 'He employs several men, who descend in turn - can stay five hours at a time with the utmost ease, as a proof of which we have heard it said, that one of the divers who was tipsy the day before, on going down yielded to a propensity to sleep, and a companion had to descend to raise him from his slumbers.'

In 2007 the private owners of Portpatrick harbour applied to build a 57-berth marina and pontoons, but the council deemed it ‘completely inappropriate for the conservation of the area’. Locals formed a trust, and by 2012 they bought the harbour for £350,000.

South of Portpatrick (where the Southern Upland Way begins) there are umpteen caves and indentations. William Purves, a Victorian traveller, clown and strongman, shunned the world for Sheep Rink cave. There are two photographs of this hirsute hermit, in one of which he is holding a cup in his left hand and what looks like a kebab in his right but is probably a good helping of bannock. He did odd jobs for farmers and, ever the performer, sold postcards of himself. He even had a cave visitors’ book. As he got older, he flitted into a summerhouse near Ardwell before ending his days in the poorhouse in Stranraer.

The gulf stream warms the Rhins, and at Port Logan Botanic Gardens, there are groves of gunnera and eucalyptus, and numerous plants from Australasia, the Americas, and Southern Africa. These gardens famously doubled as Christopher Lee’s in The Wicker Man.

Walk along Luce Sands on a hot day and you could, if you’re a dreamer, imagine yourself in the Caribbean. The beach, which unknown copywriters dubbed ‘Scotland’s little secret’, is sweeping, long, shallow and gorgeously situated. At low tide you could walk the six miles between Sandhead and Ringdoo Point along sand. Its dunes made it an official Special Conservation Area, but, as usual along south-west Scotland, there is a caveat.

Yes. War games and the physics of death again. Red lines on the map. Danger Area. West Freugh has had a military presence of some sort or another since the First World War. Now the MoD is considering the 800-acre site for a UK deep space monitoring station. It is already a land and sea, weapons testing and training base. (In April 1957, a UFO was seen on radar 50,000 feet above RAF West Freugh. It was stationary for around 10 minutes and then took an impossibly sharp turn. It was described as being as large as a ship, and bigger than a normal aircraft. )

Fifty years ago, nearby Glenwhan was wild moorland, but it is now an impressive garden with plants from around the world: a slice of heaven, with winding paths, tasteful sculptures, tranquil ponds, and wonderful sea views. Hungry for sandeels, kittiwakes breeze down the coast, and terns steer east. Tessa Knott and Ian Sinclair bought Glenwhan over the telephone in 1971 after exploring Galloway ruins during a visit.

Now many years on, the garden they created is, I would agree with Tessa, ‘a small piece of Nature’s magnificence’.