Lighthouse Scotland
Galloway & the Dark Sky
DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY
REMOTE
HERITAGE
COAST
Six nights in the south-west — the part of Scotland visitors quietly forget. A hill-farm supper with the family who run it, an afternoon at one of Britain's finest small art collections, and a night under the Galloway dark-sky park with an astronomer who travels with his own telescope. Empty roads, late light, no traffic.
A sense of the days
ARRIVAL — GLASGOW
Met at Glasgow in the early afternoon. South-west through Ayrshire to Galloway, the drive that most visitors never do. A stay at the Scotland’s most regal boutique hotel - Glenapp Castle.
1
THE GALLOWAY FOREST
A morning in the impressive local 7000-acre estate with a local guide — red deer, red squirrels, and the kind of woodland that has been forest for a thousand years. Lunch in a hill farm. Afternoon at leisure. After dinner, out into the Dark Sky Park — the first one designated in Britain, and still the best.
2
THE SOLWAY
A slow coastal day along the south shore. Threave in the morning — a 14th-century keep on its own small island. Lunch at a kitchen-garden estate. A wildfowling walk on the merse in the late afternoon — geese in their thousands at dusk in the autumn.
3
WHITHORN AND THE MACHARS
West to Whithorn — the cradle of Scottish Christianity, older than Iona by a hundred years, and almost nobody comes here. A long lunch on the peninsula. An afternoon at the gardens at Logan, which take Mediterranean species the rest of Scotland can't grow.
4
DEPARTURE — GLASGOW
A last walk along the Solway shore. North through the forest, one stop at Drumlanrig — the Buccleuch family's pink-stone palace, with a Rembrandt on the wall and the long story of the Leonardo that used to be. Glasgow airport by mid-afternoon.