DEFOE COMES TO TOWN

The wonder of North Britain

KIRKCUDBRIGHT (‘Ker-coo-bree’) is a real town in the southwest of Scotland. The region about it is Galloway, known for centuries as a quiet backwater sustained by fishing and farming.

Its low green hills carry sheep and the characteristic Galloway ‘Beltie’ cow, but keep at their heart the mountains of the Galloway Forest Park, a wild and desolate place.

Kirkcudbright lies off the main tourist routes, and comfortably away from the A75 and its Irish lorries. The eighteenth-century High Street, narrowly unsympathetic to traffic, dog legs awkwardly around a corner at the old Tolbooth and down towards the MacLellan Castle. The nineteenth century added a new parish church to the town and took through-traffic along St Mary’s and St Cuthbert’s Streets with their new shops. Little seems to have changed since.

People seem to like it that way. Daniel Defoe visited in the early eighteenth century and lamented:

Here is a harbour without ships, a port without a trade, a fishery without nets, a people without business… it is to me the wonder of North-Britain; especially, being so near England, that it has all the invitations to trade that Nature can give them, but they take no notice of it.

Whatever Defoe’s ambitions for the town, it has retained an unhurried air and a quiet dignity in sharp contrast to the frenzy of cities, or even of large towns like Dumfries.