Moffat

The Ram and the Double High Street

On the High Street there is a bronze ram standing on a drinking fountain, and it has no ears. It was gifted to the town in 1875 by William Colvin, who made his money in iron and sheep breeding, and sculpted by the Victorian sculptor William Brodie. Legend has it a farmer at the unveiling took one look and shouted "It has nae lugs!" The ram is now the town's emblem, which tells you something about Moffat's sense of humour.

The High Street is unusually wide, and there are in fact two of them running in parallel — a "double high street" — plus a smaller one called Well Street round the corner. All of it is walkable. Along here you'll find bookshops, antique dealers, craft shops, and the Moffat Toffee Shop, run by the Blacklock family for over 125 years. They make the famous Moffat Toffee on the premises, more than 300 kilos a week.

Coaching Hotels and Local Dining

You are not short of somewhere to eat. The Annandale Arms, a coaching-era hotel with an AA Rosette, sources locally — Dumfriesshire lamb, Scotch beef, west coast scallops, Stornoway black pudding, Taylors of Biggar ice cream. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "the best meal we had in Scotland."

The Famous Star Hotel is the world's narrowest, per the Guinness Book of Records: twenty feet wide, 162 feet long, with eight en-suite bedrooms. It has been there since the late 1700s.

Burns at the Black Bull and Walks from Town

The Black Bull is older still. Built in 1568, it claims to be one of the oldest hostelries in Scotland, and the food — burgers with onion rings, pie and chips, sticky toffee pudding — gets called "first rate." Robert Burns drank here, and after watching the petite Miss Deborah Davies ride past with a portly companion, scratched a verse onto a windowpane with a diamond stylus: "Ask why God made the Gem so small, and why so huge the Granite?" The original pane went to a Russian grand duke in 1817 and is now in St Petersburg; a replica hangs in the pub's Burns Room.

The walking starts more or less at the front door. The Annandale Way runs 55 miles from the source of the River Annan to the sea, and its first stage climbs up and around the Devil's Beef Tub — a deep natural hollow between four hills, once used by the Johnstone reivers to hide raided cattle. Fifteen minutes' drive out, the Grey Mare's Tail drops 60 metres in a hanging valley, with a steep trail up to Loch Skeen above it.

Spa Heritage and Getting Here

Moffat was a spa town from 1633, its sulphurous springs believed to cure gout, and for a while it was spoken of alongside Bath and Harrogate. The grand Hydropathic Hotel had over 300 bedrooms until it burned down in 1921. John Loudon McAdam, who gave the world the road surface that became tarmac, died here in 1836 and lies in the old kirkyard under a stone reading "I die at least an honest man."

Lockerbie station, on the West Coast Main Line, is about twenty minutes away by car; the A74(M) runs close by.

Moffat After Dark

It is now an official Dark Sky Community, so on a clear night you can stand on the wide High Street, past the earless ram, and see rather a lot of stars.