We have just returned from the Whithorn peninsula. The cone shaped peninsula that juts out from Galloway into the entrance of the Solway Firth. With gentle rolling hills and moors known as the Machars, grazed by the distinctive black with white strip Galloway cows, this hidden area of Scotland is steeped in history.
The first context for Whithorn’s history is religious. St. Ninian is credited as being the first missionary to Scotland in around AD 400. Everywhere around the peninsular are references to Ninian. His cave on the southern shore facing the Solway firth is a popular visitor attraction. Though I have to say that on this trip we did not have the time and weather on our side to walk there. His footprint is also found in the village of Whithorn and the port of Isle of Whithorn. Chapels and abbeys in glorious decay.
The purpose of our trip was to catch up on some more details about the background of the McKie family, my wife’s family. Her Great Grandfather brought up his family in Kirkinner, or to be precise, Braehead, a small hamlet on the road out of Kirkinner. John McKie was a Stonemason. He died tragically, by drowning at Port William, at the young age of 32. He left his wife Agnes with six children to bring up. She was dependant on the Parish under the Poor Laws for subsistence allowances that meant that she had to take up Dressmaking at home for an income and making sure that her children were independent at an early age.
Brahead and Kirkinner at the beginning of the 20th Century. Newton Cottage, where the McKies lived, is close to the apex of the two red A roads, overlooking the old railway line that was created there in the 1870’s. Kirkinner station is marked with the red station symbol and Kirkinner church is below that near the Manse. (With permission from the National Library of Scotland)
Kirkinner is close to Wigton, Wigton Bay, Garlieston and the Isle of Whithorn (which is not really an island, and very firmly part of the mainland), and it was a key part of the early railway line that connected Whithorn with the rest of the world. Now almost completely erased from the landscape.
Our first stop was at Wigton after a long drive via Ayr, Girvan and the road that skirts the Galloway Forest, a route made famous in Dorothy L Sayers crime novel “Five Red Herrings”. Wigton is the Book Town of Scotland and is home to several second-hand bookshops, one in particular is always a treat for a browse amongst books that you will never find in Oxfam.
Wigton was also a place that Agnes McKie lived in for a short time after all her children had left home. Her older sister, Janet, lived with her retired husband and two grown up children in South Main Street. One of the mistakes that is made when you go on a field trip, is not to take research information with you. I had in my mind that Agnes was living in 6 Main Street. Returning home and checking I now realise that, from the 1911 Census return, it was in fact 16 South Main Street. My photos of both 6 North and South Main Street are rendered useless, and I have nothing to show this year of the property that Agnes lived in. It is a beautiful street with a bowling green and public garden in the middle, surrounded by second hand bookshops.
Our next stop was in the small town of Whithorn, home to the Whithorn Trust, an old Abbey and one of the largest cemeteries that I have seen in such a small town.
I was here to find Julia Muir Watt, an ethnologist who lives in the town and who undertakes living history interviews with people who grew up in the Whithorn area. These are lodged in the University of Edinburgh archives. One of them is online and is an account of a woman’s life, Mrs. McShane, on the Glasserton Estate, a mile south of Whithorn, where she lived most of her life. She was the daughter of the Head Gardener between the Wars, and she describes, in detail, the lay out of the gardens and house at Glasserton, owned then by the descendant of the family that built the house in the 18th Century, Admiral Robert Johnston Stewart. There is nothing of the mansion house left to be seen, it was demolished in 1948 after mistreatment by the army during the Second World War, and and the gardens are now known as Woodfall Gardens.
Julia Watt runs Pend Books and it is no longer a bookshop but an online business. We were directed to knock on the back door by someone at the Whithorn Trust shop. She came to the door and after introducing myself she became pleased, I think, that someone had read the transcript of one of her interviews and was wanting to know a bit more about Glasserton. There was not a lot more to learn but it was nice to meet someone who is very much a history carrier for the area.
We were spending the weekend in a friend’s bungalow just south of Garlieston. This is a fishing harbour steeped in history. Steamers regular offered excursion trips to the Isle of Man from here, just 35miles across the Irish Sea.
The Whithorn peninsula showing the old rail route passing through Wigton and Kirkinner to the town of Whithorn, at the beginning of the 20th Century. The steamer route from Garlieston to the Isle of Man is shown. (From The Railway Atlas of Scotland by D.Spaven 2015).
It has a particularly important part in the history of the Second World War and the D Day Landings. An excellent exhibition and video presentation explains all in the Community Hall at the Harbour front. Attacking the German army on French soil was a problem because there was no way of safely getting heavy tanks and armoury over the Channel and landing them safely and quickly onto dry land. Churchill instructed the military to invent a way of doing this and to find a solution to the problem of making fast landings of heavy machinery in any weather. Garlieston, and Rigg Bay, along the shore, was the testing ground for what became known as the Mulberry Harbour. There is nothing to see here that tells you the story. The only clue is a buoy marker in the Rigg Bay sea which the Ordnance Survey map shows as ‘Mulberry (dis)’.
Rigg Bay is also known as Cruggleton Bay on the map. Cruggleton is the name of the area of land between the bungalow that we were staying in and the bay. It has the remains of an old castle and the Old Cruggleton Church.
We travelled to Wigton on the Saturday to go to the weekly market. A very small affair with some local craftspeople selling the work or produce. We came across a nursery man who we had met before many years ago and bought some plants for the garden. He specialises in perennial plants that will grown well in the South West of Scotland.
Returning via Braehead, to my surprise, we spotted a cottage on the roadway with the sign Newton Cottage in the drive. For many years during my research of the McKie family, I knew that they had lived all their lives in Braehead. In some Census returns they lived at 6 Braehead. Most of the housing on this stretch of the road is modern bungalows. There was little chance of finding the location of the cottage that the McKie’s lived in. However, on two records, the birth registration of John McKie, John and Agnes’s third born child, the address is Newton Cottage. On the other, Alexander McKie’s birth registration, the address is Newton O’Baldoon. The coincidence was too strong to ignore. There was a man working on his car in the drive and I stopped to speak with him. He explained that he had recently bought the cottage, the selling point for him was the view from the back overlooking Wigton Bay. He also said that the Home Report on the house stated that it was built around 1900.
Without actual records it would be a challenge to say for certain that this was the McKie residence in 1875. However, it has always been called Newton Cottage and the view onto Wigton Bay is the Baldoon Sands. Consequently, I think I can safely claim that this was the birthplace of my wife’s grandfather, Andrew McKie, in 1872. His two siblings John and Alexander were both born at Newton Cottage and Newton O’Baldoon, meaning at Newton Cottage overlooking Baldoon.
The next day we travelled to Glasserton Church. The church was the Glasserton Estate Church, and everyone who lived and worked on the estate in the early 20th Century was expected to attend. That meant the Landed Gentry’s family, their servants, their gardeners, their tenant farmers, and their families. Mrs. McShane in her interview with Julia Watt, tells the story about how if any of the tenant farmers failed to attend Sunday service then the Bailiff rode round to their houses and fined them for non-attendance. A slightly humorous image but also a disturbing insight into the moral policing of the landowner and the Church.
The Church at Glasserton and its churchyard are fascinating. We found the headstones of the Johnston Stewart family from the early twentieth century and the more recent headstones of some of the victims of the Solway Harvester tragedy. The entire crew came from the Isle of Whithorn. This was a fishing boat that sank with the loss of all hands in 2000 under tragic circumstances, off the coast of the Isle of Man.
The Church was locked but I was able to take several photos through the windows which showed clearly that nothing had changed. The layout of the pews meant that the pulpit could be seen from three directions plus the galleries. All the pews are numbered, and I am sure that everyone who attended knew their place. The location of the church is stunning and the layout of the land as a park land estate is beautiful to look at. There is a well prepared track leading across the surround fields to the coast and St.Ninian’s Cave.
We couldn’t finish this field trip without paying our respects to Agnes McKie who had paid for a memorial stone to be erected in the Kirkinner Parish Church. We had discovered this a few years ago. We noticed that in the years since, it was now encrusted with lichen. We made a note to return in the future with brushes and other cleaning materials after we have learned how to clean the stone.
