Kirkcudbright

Tides and dismantled stone

The marina at Kirkcudbright looks like two different places depending on when you arrive. At high water it is a proper harbour, boats afloat, the busiest working harbour and marina in Dumfries and Galloway. Six hours later the tide has gone out of the River Dee and the same boats are sitting in mud. It is the only town on the Solway Coast with a working harbour, and the tide runs the show.

Behind it stands the ruin of MacLellan's Castle, built in the 1570s by Sir Thomas MacLellan of Bombie, chief magistrate, who saved on materials by dismantling the medieval friary and using its stone. The friary had stood on the same ground since the thirteenth century. Edward I stopped at its altar in July 1300 and left an offering of seven shillings.

Artists and Burns

The houses along the High Street are washed in pastels, Georgian and dignified, and painters have been coming here for roughly two hundred years for the light off the Solway, which is sharp in a way that is hard to explain until you see it. The nickname is the Artists' Town. Edward Atkinson Hornel lived at Broughton House on the High Street from 1901 until his death in 1933; the National Trust for Scotland keeps it now. Jessie M. King worked here too. When Dorothy L. Sayers set a Lord Peter Wimsey novel among the local colony in 1931, she based an unpleasant character on Hornel, with whom she had recently fallen out.

For a bed and a plate, the Selkirk Arms is the obvious stop. The building dates to 1777, and Robert Burns lodged here around 1794 — he is thought to have written the Selkirk Grace in the lounge, now called The Burns Room, before handing it to the Earl of Selkirk over supper. The fish and chips and the lamb are the ones people order, and in summer a wood-fired oven in the garden turns out pizza and flatbreads on Fridays through Sundays.

Gin, music, cakes and jail walls

The Masonic Arms on Castle Street does drinks rather than dinner — sandwiches and haggis if you need something. It stocks over 270 gins, was named Scottish Gin Bar of the Year in 2022, and one reviewer called it a "cosy pub... with warm fires, impeccably friendly staff and an encyclopedic drinks list." Children are not allowed. The Steam Packet Inn, named for the old Solway steam-packet trade, stays open late with live music.

Brambles sells artisan cheeses and deli goods; Mulberries on St Cuthbert Street does home-baked cakes and a range of scones. The Tolbooth Art Centre was the town jail, built in the 1620s — John Paul Jones, later the founder of the US Navy, was held in it in 1770 after a sailor died following a flogging he had ordered.

The Dee walk and onward travel

From the harbour car park a mostly surfaced path follows the tidal Dee about two miles to Tongland, past saltmarsh where skylark, redshank and lapwing breed. Dumfries and its trains are 27 miles east; the 501 bus runs to Castle Douglas and Dumfries.

The Wicker Man's sweetshop

Scenes from The Wicker Man were filmed on the High Street. The sweetshop was a gallery.