Port Logan: A Rhinns Village with 2000 Acres of Sky

The phrase, ‘sleepy little village’ could have been coined for Port Logan. It was founded in the early 19^th century, and little happened in it for two hundred years. Then in 2000, Port Logan was descended upon by a television filming crew, who transformed it into the fictional Hebridean island of Ronansay for a ‘comedy-drama’ series called 2000 Acres of Sky. For three years, Port Logan basked in Showbiz fame, but then the programme was cancelled and the village returned to its slumber. So this account of the history of Port Logan contains no more excitement than that generated by the characters in its fictional alter-ego.

Port Logan harbour

The Lairds

As a planned village, Port Logan owes its existence to the landowner who created it. The local Lairds were the McDouall family (sometimes McDowall), whose lands extended down the western side of the parish of Kirkmaiden as far as the Mull of Galloway. The McDoualls were the largest landowners in the parish, with the Earls of Stair, who founded the parish’s only other village, Drummore, having the next largest holding. The McDoualls claimed to have one of the most extensive unbroken lineages in Scotland, having been awarded their lands by John Balliol in the late thirteenth century. Their earlier seat was Castle Balzieland, a medieval towerhouse whose ruins are now part of Logan walled garden; the present Logan house dates from 1702.

Logan Botanical Garden, created by Kenneth and Nigel McDowall is one of the Rhinns's best visitor attractions. The mild climate allows exotic plants and trees to thrive. In the top right of this picture is the remains of the sixteenth century Balzieland Castle, former home of the McDoualls

Charles McDouall was killed at the battle of Flodden in 1513. Andrew Mcdouall (1685-1760), younger son of Laird Robert McDouall, was a senior Scottish advocate and took the title Lord Bankton. Colonel Andrew McDowall (1758-1834) was briefly M.P. for Wigtownshire, founded the village of Port Logan and built the present harbour. He also built the famous fishpond, which has been a visitor attraction for two centuries. Andrew’s grandson, James (1840-1896) rebuilt Logan House in an overblown ‘Scottish baronial’ style. His eldest son, Andrew Kenneth (1870-1945) was the last McDouall to be Laird of Logan. He never married, and neither did his younger brother, Nigel, but both (like their mother) were keen and skilful gardeners and created the famous exotically-planted walled garden at Logan house, that is now part of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh and the area’s most important visitor attraction.

Logan House today

Logan House turns its back on Port Logan, and looks out over Luce Bay

Logan fishpond, the brainchild of Colonel Andrew McDowall, was built in 1800 to ensure a regular supply of fish for Logan House. It was sited behind these buildings, which comprise a castellated lobby and a cottage for the fish keeper. The small building in the foreground was a bathing hut for the ladies of Logan House. The fishpond itself, a large round cavity linked to the sea, was hewn out of the rocks by French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars. The tame fish, who come to be hand-fed when a bell rings, have been a visitor attraction for 200 years

Following Kenneth’s death, the Lairdship passed to a cousin on his mother’s side. Logan House was sold to a prominent banker, R Olof Hambro, who restored it to its original size and appearance. It remains a private house today (the house and estate were last on the market in 2023, valued at £9 million).

The Village

Prior to the foundation of Port Logan and Drummore, there were no villages in the parish of Kirkmaiden. As in other agricultural areas of Scotland, the bulk of the population lived in ‘fermtouns’, small farming settlements where a number of families worked the land more or less collectively. As part of a range of agricultural improvements that swept across Scotland in the late 18^th century, fermtouns were phased out, and the land was allocated to individual farmers, who employed a number of skilled workers and labourers. Those displaced from the land drifted to the growing industrial towns, emigrated or were housed in new planned villages, such as Port Logan, that were also a response to an expanding population.

Port Logan was built on a wide bay, previously known as Port Nessock. It has just two streets, imaginatively named Low Row and High Row (or Laigh Row and Haigh Row). By the mid-nineteenth century, it had the basic amenities of a village, including a grocers, a smithy, a post office and an inn (along with a couple of informal whisky houses). It gained its own school in the 1860s, sited north of the village, as its catchment area included Logan house and estate (the school closed in the 1950s). The parish church, built in 1653, is sited on the hill between Port Logan and Drummore. The population of the village itself never exceeded 200 souls.

The whole of Port Logan village can be seen in this picture. Low Row is in the foreground, with High Row behind it. The building on the far left is the village pub, now closed. A few buildings along is Port Logan Lodge, built by Colonel Andrew McDowall as a hotel, but long converted into flats

The village seen from the pier

The 1871 census shows that as well as those who ran the amenities listed above, most of the inhabitants of the village were tradesmen and their families: masons, a cooper, a nail maker, a forester, a tiler and a stone-dyker. There was a fisherman and his family, and some who were retired. A number of homes were occupied by widows, or unmarried mothers and their offspring. Some of the women earned money as dressmakers. A couple of agricultural labourers lived in the village, but most lived in tied cottages near their farms. Two houses at the end of High Row were owned by the Admiralty and were occupied by coastguards, who watched over their part of the coast from a lookout point on the hill south of the village.

The houses of Low Row are unusually sited behind a bank that limits their view of the sea. There are various local explanations for this, but it is most likely that the bank was constructed to provide a roadway to the harbour, and had the additional benefit of protecting Low Row from flooding during storms

This building has sported a bridge since the nineteenth century. Port Logan's villagers were not an imaginative lot, and it is inevitably named Bridge House

The village today is barely changed from those times. A few new houses have been built, but inevitably many houses are now holiday lets. All the village amenities (other than a village hall) have now gone, and locals and holidaymakers must drive to Drummore for shops, post office and pubs.

The Harbour

Port Logan bay is the only safe anchorage on the Rhinns coast, and was often looked upon as a site for a port. In the 1680s, Robert McDouall gained permission from the Privy Council to build a harbour in what was then called Port Nessock bay. William Roy’s 1745 map of the Lowlands shows a pier in the bay in a similar position to the current one. It is not known what this harbour was used for, but by 1790 the pier was described as ‘wholly ruinous’.Then in the early 19^th century, the government wanted to improve sea links to Ireland, and debate raged as to whether Portpatrick, Stranraer or Port Logan would be the best site for a new port. Colonel Andrew McDowall commissioned a report from the eminent civil engineer Thomas Telford that spoke enthusiastically of Port Logan, and a design for a harbour including a pier and a breakwater was produced. In 1821, Colonel McDowall put up £3,000 to build the present harbour, with its pier and distinctive lighthouse (but not the proposed breakwater across the bay). The plan was to attract some of the trade in Irish cattle, that was at the time being shipped in bulk through Portpatrick, with donkeys providing the return cargo. The colonel also hoped for passenger traffic, and built a hotel named Port Logan Lodge to accommodate travellers. Alas, the harbour was not a success, unable to compete with the shorter crossing and greater amenities of Portpatrick. Colonel McDowall likely lost most of his investment.

Port Logan's pier, built in 1821 to Thomas Telford's design. The quaint lighthouse fell dark in 1838 following a dispute between Colonel McDowall and the Northern Lighthouse Board.

There was a shelter for the lighthouse keeper. The room to the left was (is) a latrine

The debate between the relative merits of Port Logan and Portpatrick continued, however. As late as 1864, when the Portpatrick Railway and new harbour in that village had been built, a letter in the Morning Journal extolled the virtues of Port Logan, with its greater space and easier access in bad weather, and proposed that the railway should be extended down the Rhinns. By this time, however, the debate had become largely moot, as larger and faster steamships made both harbours redundant, and Stranraer became the port for Ireland (until its replacement by Cairnryan).

Port Logan harbour still had a role to play in the local economy. With its extensive coast and few roads, the South Rhinns had long relied on the sea for transporting bulky goods. Right up until the 1940s, most of the area’s coal and lime were brought in by sea, and agricultural produce shipped out. The main southern harbour was at Drummore, but small steamers could land goods at any of the smaller bays along the coast, as well as at Port Logan. The pier was becoming damaged by the weather and the lighthouse had long gone dark, but Port Logan remained a good port in a storm until motor lorries took over in the 1950s.

The Sea

The North Channel can of course be the site of spectacularly fierce storms, and the weather governed the relationship of the Rhinns population with the sea. The waters around Port Logan were full of fish in the 19^th century, but few locals made their living as fishermen. At one level this seems surprising, but one must remember that at the time, commercial fishing was a gruelling and dangerous business; carried out from open rowing boats, and at the mercy of the conditions.

Port Logan was the site of a lifeboat station from 1866. The first lifeboat was funded by donations from the people of Edinburgh, and by R. M. Ballantyne, the writer of popular boys’ stories. Consequently it was clumsily named Edinburgh and R. M. Ballantyne. It was a rowing boat requiring ten or twelve oarsmen and also served Luce Bay, being hauled if needed over the hill to Terally bay by horses. The Galloway family, one of Port Logan’s few fishing families, was long associated with the lifeboat. Subsequent vessels were more sophisticated (and a diesel powered caterpillar tractor replaced the horses), but the service was discontinued in the 1920s, with the lifeboat station becoming the village hall.

The former lifeboat station is now the village hall. In 2000 Acres of Sky it served as Ronansay's school

Wrecks were common around the Rhinns coast. Two notable wrecks occurred near Port Logan (and are described in Scottish Shipwrecks). On 15^th February 1926, the small coastal steamship Jane, making her way from Glasgow to Liverpool, suffered engine failure in a gale and ran aground in Portavaddie cove, at the northern end of Port Logan bay (near the fishpond). Fortunately no one was hurt, and eventually the vessel was salvaged, and served for another thirty years. Far more serious was the storm of 22^nd December 1894, one of the most severe ever recorded in the region. Eleven ships were wrecked on the Galloway coast, including the Oswald, which was sailing from Londonderry to Cardiff in ballast with a crew of nineteen. The vessel was found the next morning completely broken up on the shore between Port Logan and Port Gill, and her whole crew was lost.

 

The sea has also produced mysteries. In 2006 the body of a woman was found on Port Logan beach. Despite repeated investigations, she has never been identified. 

Despite the dangers, there was a strong link between Port Logan and the sea. Many of the sons of the village became seamen, and it is said that in the ninety-odd years that Port Logan school was open, some 37 former pupils became ships’ captains.

The Sky

Port Logan wasn’t the first choice for the location of 2000 Acres of Sky The producers wanted to use the Aberdeenshire village of Pennan, which some years before had been the setting for the feature film Local Hero. To the chagrin of local businesses, however, the Laird refused permission for filming, so Port Logan it was, and pound signs appeared in the eyes of business people up and down the Rhinns.

In the series, Port Logan played the part of a fictional island off the coast of Skye, named Ronansay. The premiss was that the local authority wanted to close the island’s school due to lack of pupils. In response, the islanders advertised for a married couple with children to move to the village and take over a B & B, thus allowing the school to stay open. A single mother named Abby (played by former East Enders actress Michelle Collins) saw the advert in London and persuaded her slacker best friend Kenny (played by comedian Paul Kay) to pretend to be her husband in order to move to Ronansay. Once there, the ‘action’ (such as it was), stretching over three series, focused on the on-off relationship between Abby and Kenny, and the various other romantic entanglements that they got involved with.

Filming began in the summer of 2000, and also took place over the following two summers. The programme first aired in January 2001. The village was transformed by props. Port Logan harbour was adorned with tastefully attractive fishing gear (despite the village having little tradition of commercial fishing). The houses of Low Row also gained facelifts and new identities, with one cottage becoming a general store and Port Logan Lodge doubling as Ronansay’s pub, the Raeburn Ams. The village hall (once the lifeboat station) became Ronansay’s school.

The pier adorned with impossibly colourful props during the filming of 2000 Acres of Sky. Three small extras hope for a screen test

It is estimated that each series brought close to £1 million to the local economy, through the provision of accommodation, food and services for the cast and crew and through a boost in tourism. Cast and crew members stayed at the Fernhill hotel in Portpatrick, and the North Castle hotel in Stranraer (strolling by Portpatrick harbour one evening, the author was nearly knocked over by Michelle Collins’ dog). Locals tried to capitalise on the interest generated by the series. A teashop opened in Port Logan, boating companies offered tours of the area, and the village pub renamed itself the Raeburn Arms (after the pub in the programme).

The first series generated a fair amount of publicity, and viewing figures were around 8 million per episode. Figures dropped for the second series. Then before the third series was filmed, Paul Kay let it be known that he wanted to quit, amid rumours that off-screen he and Michelle Collins did not see eye to eye. His character, Kenny, was decisively written out mid-way through series three, being found dead on a lonely beach following a boating accident. After this series the programme was cancelled.

Hopes that like Holmfirth (Last of the Summer Wine) and Goathland (Heartbeat), Port Logan would become a place of pilgrimage for fans of 2000 Acres of Sky proved unfounded. Tourism soon returned to its previous level. The teashop disappeared, the boat trips ended and even the village pub closed down. Today, there are no memorials left to Port Logan’s fifteen minutes of fame.

Postscript: In a newspaper interview a year or so ago, Michelle Collins named Port Logan as her favourite place in Scotland. She also claimed to have eaten a deep fried Mars Bar in Portpatrick, which sounds improbable, but perhaps one of the village pubs indulged her.

The Resort

When my children were young, we spent many happy hours on Port Logan beach, and in the last couple of years we have returned there with our grandchildren. In truth, however, Port Logan isn’t much of a resort. There are no tourist amenities, other than a public convenience sited inconveniently at the far northern end of the bay (desperate visitors have been known to use the 19^th century latrine next to the old lighthouse). The keen wind rarely eases enough for sunbathing, and the brave souls who venture into the sea risk jellyfish stings. Other than strolling along the pier and visiting the fishpond, where for two hundred years, fish have come to be hand-fed by the ringing of a bell, there isn’t much entertainment other than digging sand castles, playing beach cricket and hunting for interesting rocks. Which is exactly what my family and I do.

...Or we could try fishing.

 Sources Used

 

Old and New Statistical Accounts of Rhins Parishes.

Roy Military Survey and 19^th Century Ordnance Survey maps available from the National Library of Scotland Map Images

Census returns and valuation rolls available at Scotland’s People 

Newspaper articles available at the British Newspaper Archive 

Glimpses of Old South Rhinns (with notes by Jack Hunter). Dumfries and Galloway Libraries, 1998 

Donnachie I (1971) Industrial Archaeology of Galloway. Newton Abbott: David & Charles

Hunter J (2014) Old Wigtownshire. Catrine: Stenlake Publishing 

A Portpatrick Holiday Cottage – in Dinvin Street!

Recently, for the first time, I stayed in a holiday home in Portpatrick that wasn’t my own. It was in Dinvin Street, a road that even after forty years of visiting Portpatrick I still wasn’t very familiar with. The house was clean, comfortable and well apportioned, with things that my own cottage lacked (Space! Wifi! A shower that didn’t drip through the ceiling!), but it was clear that it was old and, as estate agents like to say, retained some original features. So I naturally went straight to the internet to research its history, and that of Dinvin Street as a whole, and this is what I found.

Dinvin Street is a quiet, little used road, leading from Main Street and running parallel to the Dinvin Burn as far as the putting green. In the nineteenth century, there was just one row of houses along its north side, with the Burn on its south side. Some time in the second half of twentieth century a small row of bungalows was added towards the Main Street end. The older row (which I will concentrate on) was most likely built in the 1830s, as part of the expansion of Portpatrick in anticipation of it becoming a major port for Ireland. Although the houses in the row form a single terrace, they are all different in size and appearance, suggesting that they were not all built to a shared plan, but added to each other piecemeal by different owners. All but one are double-fronted and sizeable, and all have quite large gardens behind, albeit ascending a steep bank. For a while in the mid-nineteenth century, the harbour branch of the Portpatrick railway ran behind the gardens, dropping precariously down a 1 in 35 slope to its station, on the site of the modern tennis courts and bowling green.

The house in which I stayed is on the end of the row furthest from the putting green. When built it had six rooms, two either side of the entrance hall and two upstairs. It has been modernised throughout (more estate agent speak), but there are two Victorian fire places, though it isn’t clear if they are originals. Outside the back door, an alleyway runs along the length of the house, with a formidable whitewashed retaining wall behind, punctuated by a flight of steps leading to the sloping garden, which may have once been a 'kailyard' for growing vegetables to supplement the family's diet. Old maps confirm that the retaining wall is an original feature. Three dingy alcoves are built into it, that were likely once the privy, ash pit and coal (or peat) store. Around the garden is a splendid stone wall. Through the smooth twenty-first century modernisations, it is clear what the house would have looked like in the nineteenth century.

The end house is the smallest of the row of houses built in the 1830s on Dinvin Street

So who built and lived in the house? The short answer is, the McClymont family - or one branch of it; McClymont is a common name in Portpatrick. In 1841, its owner was James McClymont, a 45-year old builder, who was born in Portpatrick, son of a quarryman, and his wife, Margaret. It seems highly likely that he built the house, and possibly others in Dinvin Street. Its six rooms made it fairly spacious by Portpatrick standards, but it was smaller than others in Dinvin Street, and would still have seemed crowded, as in 1841 no fewer than eleven people were listed as living in it: James and his wife, their seven children, aged from 5 to 20, and Margaret’s 80-year-old mother, Elizabeth Kerr and sister, also Elizabeth. How such a range of people were accommodated, one can only guess, but the house may have been fitted with ‘box beds’, which were common at the time, to allow individuals a degree of privacy. The kitchen, with a hob or range for cooking, was likely the only communal room.

The rear of the house, from the top of the steeply sloping garden. Note the retaining walls at the bottom of the slope

By 1851, the household was down to seven: James and Margaret and four, now mostly adult children, and Margaret’s sister Elizabeth. Their son George, now 26, was also a builder, presumably working for his father, and the adult girls earned their living as dressmakers. In 1861, James and Margaret, now in their sixties, still lived with George, who was unmarried at the age of 36, and two unmarried daughters, Elizabeth, 40 and Grace, 27, still dressmakers.

In 1871 the household was down to three, James and Margaret having passed away. George, now owner of the house, was still unmarried, as were his sisters Elizabeth and Grace. But in 1873, George married Margaret Boyd from Aberdeen, over 20 years his junior, and they had a son, named John. In 1881 the household of George, his wife Margaret, sisters Elizabeth and Grace and son John was still intact, but George died suddenly in 1883, aged 54.

By 1891 there was just Margaret and her 18-year-od son John rattling around the six-room house. John was a fisherman, but gave up the sea to become a labourer on the Dunskey Estate. They were still there in 1901, but by 1911, Margaret had died and John had married Isabella Stewart, from Leswalt, who was aged 38, as was John. They apparently had no children and continued to live in the house until the 1920s, the third generation of the McClymont family to own it.

 

This pattern of ownership matches that of my own cottage in Colonel Street, another end house that was built by Robert Shearer in 1824 for himself and his family, and was passed on first to his daughter and then to her nieces; the family owning it for seventy years in all.

Eventually John and Isabella left the house, ending some ninety years of owner-occupation by the McClymont family. By this time, the houses on Dinvin Street had names, which some retain, and the end house was was named ‘Cliftonville’. In 1930 it was owned and lived in by James Allen, who before retirement had farmed Common Croft, now part of Sunnymeade caravan site. He was an elder of Portpatrick kirk and sang in the church choir. But after he died in 1938, aged 86, the house gained a new owner-occupier – one James McClymont, a retired farm worker from Leswalt, and his wife Helen. So a century after James McClymont the builder was listed as living in the end house of Dinvin Street, the wheel had come full circle.

What of the rest of Dinvin Street? No other dwelling in the road had the same continuity of ownership and occupancy. Instead, over the course of the century for which records can be accessed (1840-1940), ownerships changed hands and tenants came and went, reflecting the whole cross-section of Portpatrick’s demographic. In the mid-nineteenth century, some of the houses were divided into flats, with tenants, sometimes with large families, living in one or two rooms. Naturally, such tenants were from the poorer end of the spectrum, fishermen and their families, or widows managing on whatever provision their late husbands had been able to make for them. At other times, the comparatively large houses had just one or two occupants, sometimes retired or ‘living on their own means’. A couple of houses were occupied by serving or retired coastguards.

Dinvin Street from the sea end. The houses are all slightly different to each other, in size and design. In the mid-nineteenth century, several were 'houses of multiple occupation', but by the early twentieth century most were single-occupancy

The largest house in Dinvin Street was owned from the 1870s by John McDowall, a house carpenter, and his wife Elizabeth, who for a time ran a grocers shop on the premises. John McDowall owned other properties in Portpatrick, and in 1895 he bought my cottage in Colonel Street, renovated it and sold it on to his son Andrew, a railway telegraph clerk who supplemented his wages with the rental income. After a few years, he sold it to Jane Smith, a laundress who at one time had lived with her mother – in Dinvin Street. Such connections were of course commonplace in such a small and tightly-knit village.

The houses at the sea end of Dinvin Street on Dean Place, apparently named for a William Dean who owned the properties there at one time, are now known as Mansewood and the Spout House. Mansewood was originally occupied by Portpatrick’s Free Church minister, the formidable Rev. Andrew Urquhart, but when the Free Church rejoined the Kirk, it became a boarding house.

In the early twentieth century, John McDowall’s Dinvin Street house was passed on to his unmarried daughter Isabella, who used it as a holiday home and in 1915 advertised it as a short-term holiday let – there is nothing new under the sun in Portpatrick. But in 1925 Isabella’s ownership came to a tragic end when she committed suicide at the age of 59 by hanging herself in a workshop in the garden of the house, apparently out of anxiety at her adopted daughter, Minnie Pattinson’s marriage, which had happened the previous day.Who could have imagined such passion and violence within the bland, whitewashed walls of Dinvin Street.

Today, Dinvin Street is a quiet, rather out-of-the-way place, and one suspects that the end house is not the only one in the road that is a holiday home. But it was well worth the five-star review we gave it, and the ghosts of the McClymont family kept to themselves – as hopefully does the ghost of poor Isabella McDowall, a few doors down the road. But next time I visit Portpatrick, I will stay in my own cottage – leaking shower and all!

 

Sources Used

Census returns, valuation rolls and birth, marriage and death certificates available at Scotland’s People

Newspaper articles available at the British Newspaper Archive

Historic maps available at the National Library of Scotland

A Portpatrick Cottage that was a Haven for Women

 My cottage in Colonel Street, Portpatrick will be two hundred years old next year. It has been a holiday residence for nearly sixty years, but before that it was home to a succession of occupants. And for a hundred-year period, from the 1860s to the 1960s, it was lived in by single women. Some had never married, some were widowed, and one had been deserted by her husband. In this article, I will tell the stories of these women, and their remarkable and sometimes difficult lives. The article summarises my researches into my cottage’s history, complementing some of the other articles in this blog, and adds some new information.

"The Cottage"

 

Single Women in the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries

During this period, there were considerably more females than males in the British population. The reasons for this demographic fact are clear. Firstly, males were more likely than females to die in infancy and childhood. Secondly, adult men tended to die earlier than women, sometimes through ‘violent’ causes such as work-based accidents, suicide, the effects of alcohol abuse and, of course, warfare. The imbalance of males and females became particularly marked in the decades after the First World War, with 1.75 million more women than men in the UK. Thirdly, during the 19^th century, young men were more likely than other groups to emigrate to the colonies (Australia, Canada, South Africa), leading to a preponderance of males in the immigrant population in those countries. This gender imbalance meant that during the second half of the 19^th century, around a third of British women aged between 20 and 40 were unmarried.

These demographic factors tended to be more pronounced in areas of lower prosperity, which included Portpatrick in the second half of the 19^th century. Following the abandonment of the port for Ireland, Portpatrick went into economic decline, with an overall loss of population. Neil Tranter tells us that during these years, the death rate for boys under the age of ten rose markedly, compared with that for girls, and young men often left the village to find employment elsewhere. By 1891, females made up 57.5% of the population of the town, with a consequent drop in the number of married women.

Some women, of course, chose to be single, or perhaps put higher priority on family commitments than on marriage. But single women during this period could experience social and financial difficulties. ‘Spinster’ and ‘Old Maid’ were pejorative terms, and particularly after WWI, commentators wrote about the ‘problem’ of surplus (or superfluous) women. Undoubtedly, many such women would have liked to have married for its own sake, not just to reduce social stigma.

Single women also needed an income. War widows received a pension, but before the introduction of state support, those widowed otherwise had to manage the best they could. Employment opportunities for women were limited, and for working-class women in rural areas such as Portpatrick they were largely confined to domestic service, farm work, taking in laundry and needlework. None of these occupations paid well, and limited where single women could afford to live. In Scotland they often occupied just one or two rooms, in cottages or apartment buildings. My holiday cottage, with a living room/kitchen, scullery, large bedroom and patch of garden would have been relatively luxurious, though at different times it had to house several people at once, and was sometimes a place of work as well.

At the same time, owning and managing property was one way that single women could boost their income. Three of the women who lived in my cottage were owner-occupiers, and other women in Portpatrick owned property that they rented out. As Portpatrick became a holiday resort in the latter 19^th century, some single women managed holiday houses to rent, or became boarding house keepers, sometimes assisted by unmarried daughters.

Of course, being married was not always better for women. A married woman in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries had to rely on her husband, and Emma Griffin reminds us that not all husbands treated their wives well. Wives were expected to carry out all domestic chores, while raising often large families of children. This meant that women had no time for paid work, and were reliant on their husband’s income, which might not be great and which was sometimes frittered away. Domestic violence, drunkenness and desertion were sometimes the lot of married women.

Having given an overview of the position of working class women in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, we will now focus on those women who lived in (and sometimes owned) the cottage that is now a holiday home for my own family.

Agnes Shearer (Lived in Cottage – LIC – 1824 – 1853)

As I relate in my previous article about the history of the cottage, it was built in 1824, by a mason named Robert Shearer. He almost certainly fashioned it out of part of a longer building that was originally constructed in 1811, along the western side of Colonel Street. It was built for himself, his wife and his eldest daughter, Agnes, who had been born in Portpatrick in 1794 and was 30 years old when the family moved into the cottage. Agnes never married, and her occupation was given as ‘domestic servant’.

In 1835, Robert, now 71 and widowed, passed ownership of the cottage to Agnes, but continued to live there with her for another 18 years, dying in 1853 aged 89. Presumably Agnes’s main role during this period was to care for her ageing father.

Following Robert’s death, Agnes, now approaching her 60s, rented out the cottage and became a live-in servant to one of Portpatrick’s most notable residents, Miss Susan Jane Minot. Miss Minot came to Portpatrick in the early 1850s along with her sister Mary, who had married the village’s Free Church minister, Rev. Andrew Urquhart. Mary and Susan had been born in Jamaica, where their father, John Sutton Minot, owned a sugar plantation known as Passley Gardens, which was worked by up to 130 slaves. According to a former overseer at Passley Gardens, Benjamin McMahon, under Minot’s ownership the estate suffered as slaves were “exceedingly ill-treated to the extent that they were highly unproductive which seemed to only perpetuate the squalid conditions of starvation and poverty”.

John Sutton Minot died in 1830, and three years later slavery was abolished in the British colonies. Compensation was however paid to former slave owners, which following their father’s death, included Mary and Susan, who received over £2,000 each. Census returns throughout Susan Minot’s long life described her an an ‘annuitant’, or ‘living on own means’, giving no indication that a source of her wealth was slavery.

We cannot know how Susan Minot felt about her legacy (she was just 15 when her father died and the plantation was soon sold by the Trustees), still less what Agnes Shearer felt about being employed by a one-time slave-owner. But Susan Minot devoted her long life to charitable works, including supporting those in poverty in Portpatrick. She died at the age of 101, in 1916.

Agnes Shearer, Margaret and Maggie Cosh (LIC 1867 – 1884)

In the mid-1860s, Agnes Shearer left Susan Minot’s employment and returned to live in the cottage. She also passed on the ownership of the cottage to three of her nieces, Margaret, Agnes and Jane Cosh, daughters of her younger sister Margaret, who married John Cosh and moved to Donaghadee, across the North Channel in Ireland. One of those nieces, Margaret Cosh, then aged 32 and unmarried, came to live with Agnes in the cottage – bringing her illegitimate daughter, Maggie, aged five. We can only guess at the intense family discussions that led to Margaret and her young daughter crossing the sea to live with her 73-year-old retired aunt. It was clearly an arrangement that worked however, as the three of them lived together in the cottage for 17 years, until Agnes’s death in 1884, aged 89. Margaret earned money as a dressmaker, and when Maggie was old enough she did so too.

Following Agnes’s death, Margaret and Maggie returned to Donaghadee, where Maggie married a grocer. Margaret and her sisters retained ownership of the cottage until 1895, renting it to another single woman, Jane (Jeannie) Laing.

Jane Laing (LIC >1885 – <1905)

I have written a longer article about Jane Laing’s colourful life, and will summarise it here. She was born Jane Stewart around 1844 at High Ardwell farm, Stoneykirk Parish, where her father Andrew was a labourer. Following his death in 1855, Jane and her mother (also Jane) went to live and work at the Logan estate; Jane senior looking after the poultry at Logan Home Farm and Jane herself becoming a domestic servant at Logan House, the seat of the local Lairds, the McDouall family. There, in 1864 at the age of 20, Jane had an illegitimate daughter, named Annie, the identity of the father not recorded. Annie features later in the story of the cottage.

In 1867, Jane married Peter Laing, a groom at Logan House, and they quickly had two sons, John and William. However, by the time of William’s birth in 1870, Peter Laing had left his wife, who moved with her mother back to High Ardwell farm. Peter apparently left the country, but may have continued to support Jane financially, while moving up the domestic service ladder to valet and later butler.

Following her mother’s death in 1879, Jane moved with John and William to Portpatrick (Annie had by now left home, presumably to work in domestic service). They lived at a couple of addresses in the village, and in 1883, at the age of 40, Jane gave birth to her fourth child, a daughter named Maggie. Peter Laing was named as Jane’s husband on Maggie’s birth certificate, but the registrar blandly wrote that Jane, “declares that he is not the father of the child, and farther, that she has had no personal communication with him for several years past”. As with Annie, the identity of Maggie’s father was not recorded. As Jane did not tell the registrar the circumstances of Maggie’s birth, we cannot know them either.

Sometime after 1885, when Margaret and Maggie Cosh moved back to Donaghadee, Jane and her family moved into my cottage. It is interesting that one single woman with an illegitimate daughter was replaced in the cottage by another. By 1891, John and William had left home (William will also reappear later in this article) and Jane was living in the cottage with Maggie and was working as a laundress – either the financial support she had received from Peter had dried up or with just Maggie to look after, she had time to earn money herself. Jane and Maggie lived in the cottage for over ten years, and perhaps nearly twenty years (during which time the Cosh sisters sold the cottage to a Portpatrick joiner, John McDowall, who subsequently sold it to his son Andrew, a railway telegraph clerk who lived in Carstairs). By 1905, however, they had moved to South Crescent. In 1907 Maggie married an Ayrshire mason, Robert Mochan. Her mother lived the rest of her long and eventful life in the Lighthouse Cottage on the sea front, dying in 1929, aged 85.

Jane Smith (LIC <1905 – 1918)

Another article in this blog details the seafaring Smith family of Portpatrick in the 19^th century. Jane Smith was born in Portpatrick in 1839, her father a seaman on the packet service between Portpatrick and Donaghadee. In around 1846, he died, leaving his wife Mary with five children under the age of 10. Mary made ends meet by working as a ‘flourer of muslin’, a needlewoman working from home making Ayrshire Whitework, a lace-like material used for collars, cuffs, babies’ bonnets, etc. In the mid-19th century, over 200,000 women worked at this craft, mostly in Western Scotland and Northern Ireland. As soon as she was old enough, Jane joined her mother as a flourer. Jane never married, and lived with her mother at various addresses in Portpatrick until Mary’s death in 1878. Her four brothers all married, and all made their living from the sea: John, James and David as Portpatrick fishermen and Hugh as a ship’s carpenter.

By the 1890s, the Ayrshire Whitework trade had virtually disappeared due to changing fashion tastes, and Jane, still needing to support herself financially, became a laundress. Sometime before 1905, she succeeded her fellow laundress Jane Laing in my cottage, and lived there until her death in 1918. For a couple of years, her widowed brother David lived with her in the cottage, David dying there in 1913.

Initially, Jane was a tenant of Andrew McDowall, but in 1908, aged 69, she inherited a sum of money from her mother’s late brother John McKie, a farmer from Wigtown. Jane used her windfall to retire from laundry work and to buy the cottage, subsequently enjoying ten years of retirement and ownership before her death aged 79. In her will, she left the cottage to Samuel Balfour, an engine-driver living in Stranraer and the husband of her niece Mary. Samuel owned the cottage for twelve years and it apparently had just one tenant during that time.

Isabella Munro Anderson (LIC 1918 – 1929)

Isabella Munro Ferguson was born in Oban, Argyleshire, in 1888, daughter of a joiner. She became a domestic servant and in 1911, aged 23, she was living in Edinburgh, in the household of George Dalzeil, a ‘Writer to the Signet’ – a Scottish legal term for a senior solicitor. Later that year, however, she married Andrew Anderson, a gamekeeper at the Glenapp estate near Ballantrae, Ayrshire, which was owned by the 1^st Earl of Inchcape. Andrew had been born at Auchtremaken farm, on the Dunskey estate at Portpatrick, where his father was a shepherd. In 1912, their daughter Catherine was born at Glenapp.

When the Great War broke out, Andrew enlisted in the Ayrshire Yeomanry. This was a reserve regiment, and at first he remained at home. His and Isabella’s second daughter, Isabella Jane, was born in February 1915. Later that year, Andrew transferred to the Wiltshire Regiment, which was posted abroad, initially to France, but after a few months to northern Greece, where it was engaged in a little-known campaign against Bulgaria, an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The Macedonian Front, as it was known, involved trench warfare, but in extreme Balkan weather. The Bulgarians proved to be obdurate opponents and several inconclusive battles were fought before they finally surrendered in 1918. Sadly, Andrew Anderson did not see the end of the campaign, as he was killed in action on 10^th February 1917. He is buried at a War Graves cemetery at Doiran,Greece, near the border with North Macedonia.

In 1918, Isabella, aged 30, and her daughters, aged 7 and 3, moved to the cottage, with Samuel Balfour as their landlord. They presumably lived on Isabella’s war widow pension. In 1929, they left the cottage; valuation rolls suggest that Isabella may have become owner-occupier of a house in Wigtown. We must wait until the release of the 1931 Scottish census (happily not destroyed by fire, as happened to that year’s English and Welsh censuses) to confirm this. She never remarried. In a strong field, Isabella proved to be the longest lived of the cottage’s occupants, dying in Forfar in 1979, aged 91.

Annie McMurray (LIC 1930 – 1954)

In 1929 and 1930, a sequence of events changed the cottage’s direction. In 1929, Isabella and her family moved out, and in the same year, the cottage’s former occupant Jane Laing died, aged 85. After Isabella Anderson and her family left, Samuel Balfour sold the cottage. It was bought by Margaret Laing, wife of Jane Laing’s son William, then living in Perth and working as a railway telegraph inspector. Margaret Laing installed a new tenant, a 66 year old widow named Annie McMurray. We have met her already, as she was born Annie Stewart, the illegitimate eldest daughter of Jane Laing, and therefore Margaret Laing’s sister-in-law. From this distance we cannot know how these events were related to each other within the tiny social world of Portpatrick.

Details of Annie McMurray’s earlier life are scanty, but as previously mentioned she was born in 1864 while Jane and her mother were living and working at Logan House. Jane was unmarried at the time, and Annie’s father was not named on her birth certificate. By the time that Jane Laing moved to Portpatrick in the 1880s Annie had left home, presumably to work as a domestic servant as her mother had originally done. At some point she married James McMurray, a ship’s engineer from Glasgow and in 1901 they were living in the centre of that city. They apparently had no children.

In early 1914, some months before the outbreak of the Great War, James McMurray set sail from Glasgow as Chief Engineer of the tramp steamer Strathspey, on a voyage to the Far East, and then back through the Suez canal, destination New York. The newspaper report of the voyage, written when the Strathspey reached New York, would be comic if it was not laced with tragedy. On the outward journey, a Chinese stoker was killed by falling into the hold and the ship drifted for three days as the remaining stokers were too frightened of his ghost to enter the hold themselves. In Canton, a port worker was killed by a blow to the head from a large chain while loading the ship. And en route to New York, the Strathspey was assailed, according to reports from the crew, by a great green sea serpent that raised itself several feet above the water, scorched all around with its hot breath, bit off the lifeboat’s rudder and then made off at a rate of 50 knots.

Even the report of what happened to James McMurray has tragi-comic overtones. He was described as “over 60 years of age and very melancholy” (he was actually 49), but very attached to the ship’s parrot, Toko. But after talking to Toko one morning, off the coast of Malta, he suddenly jumped overboard. Toko set up a repeated alarm call of “Eight bells, eight bells”, alerting the crew. The ship was halted and a search was made, but McMurray was never found.

So Annie McMurray’s husband committed suicide while at sea. The circumstances of her life following this tragedy, up until the time she came to live in the cottage, are not known. But perhaps Margaret Laing’s purchase of the cottage and installation of Annie as her tenant was an act of rescue. It certainly gave Annie a long-term home, as she lived there for twenty-four years, until her death in 1954, aged 89.

Following Annie’s death, Margaret Laing, now in her 80s and herself widowed, and living in the seaside town of Largs, sold the cottage. In Portpatrick cemetery there is a memorial to Jane, William and Margaret Laing and Annie McMurray, presumably erected after Margaret’s death in 1966 by William and Margaret’s children. The cottage was purchased by a Portpatrick joiner, Allan Auld Rankin, who undertook extensive renovations and sold it a year later (at 100% profit) to Mrs Margaret Fraser, then living in Port Logan schoolhouse, possibly as a holiday let. However, Mrs Fraser owned the cottage for less than a year before moving away from Port Logan and selling it to its final full-time occupant, my great-aunt Elsie Dicks. Again, Elsie’s story is told in greater detail in another article in this blog and is summarised below.

Elsie Dicks (LIC 1956-1966)

When Elsie Dicks bought the cottage, she was 67 years old and had been widowed for nine years. She had been born Elsie Maud Winter in Kent in 1889, daughter of a Commercial Clerk. Her presence in Wigtownshire was due to her husband, my mother’s uncle Valentine Frank Dicks (1889-1947). He had been born in South London, but for unknown reasons had moved to Edinburgh in his early twenties, and when the Great War broke out in 1914 was working as a clerk in the Princes Street branch of Thomas Cook, the travel agents. He did not rush to join up, and when conscription was introduced in 1916 applied for exemption as a conscientious objector. Like many of my family, he was a member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, and his objection to military service was on religious grounds (although the New Church as a whole was not pacifist). Like many others at that stage of the war, his application was approved, but he was still obliged to join the army, being allocated to the ‘Non-combatant Corps’. Again, like many others, he refused to do so and was imprisoned for 118 days. Following his release, (and a change of official policy) he spent the rest of the war in a labour camp set up in Dartmoor prison, carrying out “work of national importance”, which was mainly standard prison fare such as sewing mailbags or breaking rocks.

Following the war, Frank returned to his job at Thomas Cook, but transferred to the office in Stranraer, probably to avoid stigma and tensions with his former workmates. In 1919 he married Elsie, his childhood sweetheart and she moved to Stranraer with him. In 1923, their only child, a son named Peter, was born.

Elsie Dicks and her new-born son Peter in 1923

 

Frank left Thomas Cook and took on a general store in Hanover Street, Stranraer. In the 1930s he tried a more ambitious business venture, opening a restaurant and nightclub, ambitiously named the Ritz and unpromisingly sited in a former reform school on Dalrymple Street. This business soon failed, and Uncle Frank was declared bankrupt. Following this setback, Elsie helped keep the family’s head above water, and eventually Frank set up a new business selling and installing fireplaces, with Peter joining him in this trade.

When World War Two broke out, Peter was keen to join up, and trained as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. We do not know what his father, the former conscientious objector, thought of this. Peter was allocated to 831 squadron, flying Fairey Barracuda torpedo bombers and based on the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious, on active service in the Indian Ocean. On 4^th August 1944, Peter flew in to make his first landing on the deck of the carrier, but the landing gear designed to catch the aircraft apparently failed and the plane, unable to stop, fell over the side. By tragic irony, twenty eight years after his father was imprisoned as a conscientious objector and on his first operational flight, Peter Dicks became the only member of my family to be killed serving in WW2. He is buried in Trincomalee military cemetery, Sri Lanka.

Frank Dicks died in 1947 aged 58, following a stroke. Perhaps his health had been affected by the loss of his son. At some point (the records are ambiguous) Elsie went to live in a cottage in Larbrax Bay, north of Killantringan, before purchasing and moving to the cottage in Portpatrick in 1956.

Although hundreds of miles from the rest of her family, Elsie kept in touch and some came to stay with her for holidays, including her niece, my late aunt Barbara Nicholls. Following Elsie’s death in 1966, aged 77, Barbara Nicholls bought the cottage from her estate. Thus began the next stage of its existence, as a holiday home for Aunt Barbara, and later for me and my family.

Conclusion

There is of course nothing unusual about this history of the women who lived in my cottage. The large numbers of single women in Britain in the 19^th and early 20th centuries means that similar tales could be told about countless cottages across the country. But what general points can we glean from this snapshot of one humble cottage in Portpatrick?

One striking feature is how long-lived its residents were. At a time when life expectancy was much lower than today, all six principal occupants of the cottage lived to ripe old ages (Agnes Shearer: 89; Jane Laing: 85; Jane Smith: 79; Isabella Anderson: 91; Annie McMurray: 89; Elsie Dicks: 77). Of course, we cannot attribute their longevity to the cottage; stronger factors were likely to be a healthy plain diet, lots of physical activity, and avoidance of the (sometimes self-inflicted) misfortunes that could befall men in this period.

This leads on to a second point, that these women’s lives were ultimately determined by men. None made a great personal mark; those that worked did so in the restricted range of occupations that working-class women could pursue (domestic service, needlework, laundry work). Men, or their absence, ultimately decided their fates. Agnes Shearer, as an unmarried daughter, took on the role of caring for her aged father. The early death of Jane Smith’s father meant that she needed to devote her life to supporting her mother (and later her brothers). Jane Laing, Isabella Anderson and Annie McMurray’s lives were all tainted by the loss of their husbands, through desertion, death in battle or suicide. Elsie Dicks took herself away from her South London family to support Uncle Frank in his ventures in a small Scottish town. Furthermore, Jane Laing and Margaret Cosh had to cope with the stigma of bearing illegitimate children, and bringing them up without male support. The story of the cottage is in large part a story of the constraints that women often labour under.

But ultimately, we cannot really know how these women felt about their situations, or how they went about their daily lives. The bland data of title deeds, statutory records, census returns and valuation rolls throw up tantalising hints, but cannot answer the fundamental question: what were these women like? The only one I had personal acquaintance with was Elsie Dicks, who I met as a child when she was visiting her sister in Anerley, South London. Neither of us had any idea that nearly sixty years later I would own her cottage and would be trying to research her life. The passing of my parents’ generation means that even Elsie’s story is fading from living memory.

So we cannot know how these women coped with their lot, or about the cottage that they passed on to each other. But all made it their home for a considerable length of time. None lived there for less than ten years and Agnes Shearer’s association with it, as resident or owner, spanned sixty years. I hope that they found the cottage a haven in their sometimes difficult lives, and could appreciate the unique atmosphere of Portpatrick as much as I and my family do.

 

Sources Used 

Census returns, valuation rolls and birth, marriage and death certificates available at Scotland’s People

Newspaper articles available at the British Newspaper Archive

Griffin E (2020) Bread Winner: An intimate history of the Victorian Economy. Yale Univeesity Press

Tranter N (1978) The demographic impact of economic growth and decline, Portpatrick 1821-1890. The Scottish Historical Review 57(163): 87-105

Tuckett S (2016) “Needle Crusaders”: The 19^th Century Ayrshire Whitework Industry. Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 36(1): 60-80

 

“The Most Bracing of Seaside Resorts”: Portpatrick as a Holiday Destination

Recently, an acquaintance told me that he once took a holiday at Portpatrick. This happens surprisingly often. For such a small place Portpatrick seems to be a widely known and frequented holiday destination. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, for the history of Portpatrick as a seaside resort goes back nearly 150 years, and many thousands of people will have sampled the attractions of the village over that time. In this article, I will trace the development of Portpatrick as a place for holidays, day trips and excursions, and how it has adapted, like the British seaside as a whole, to changing tastes and circumstances.

The classic view of Portpatrick from the northern cliff steps, showing most of the features that make it an attractive resort

The Rise and (Partial) Fall of the British Seaside Holiday

“The sea air and sea bathing together were nearly infallible, one or the other of them being a match for every disorder...Nobody could catch cold by the sea, nobody wanted spirits, nobody wanted strength” (Jane Austen: Sanditon)

The British love of the seaside dates back to the eighteenth century, when ‘taking the waters’ became a fashionable therapy across Europe for all kinds of physical and mental ailments. On the continent, and to an extent in Britain, this led to the growth of spas, which took advantage of natural mineral springs. In Britain, with its extensive and relatively easily accessible coastline, sea bathing became a popular alternative, and the well-off began to frequent newly-founded seaside resorts. Sometimes they stayed in hotels, but more often rented houses, transporting their families and servants en masse, sometimes for a month or more during the summer. Resorts became social as well as wellness centres, and seaside promenades became places to be seen and to socialise with one’s peers.

The seaside also met the fashionable aesthetic taste for the ‘sublime’. Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon, set in a fictional south coast resort, gently mocks the Georgian fondness for the seaside as both a health cure and an aesthetic experience. Sir Edward Denham, trying to impress newcomer Charlotte Heywood,

“began, in a tone of great taste and feeling, to talk of the sea and the sea shore – and ran with energy through all the usual phrases employed in praise of their sublimity, and descriptive of the indescribable emotions they excite in the mind of sensibility”.

Nonetheless (and Jane Austen was herself very fond of the seaside), resorts, or ‘watering places’, as they were known, were flourishing in Britain by the early years of the nineteenth century. At this time, they were still the preserve of the rich and idle; the mass of the population had neither the time or the money to travel away for holidays. This changed, however, as the century progressed, with the coming of steamships, and then railways. These gave access to the seaside to the growing masses of the working class from the cities of the industrial revolution. As John Walton put it,

“The earliest days of cheap travel for the masses saw the seaside opened out to all who could afford the journey, which often cost much less than a day’s wages for a skilled workman”.

Blackpool became a magnet for the textile workers of Lancashire. In Scotland, steamships on the Clyde were the first vehicles for seaside visits, and resorts such as Rothesay and Largs became popular with Glasgow workers taking trips on a Saturday or Sunday, while Portobello and North Berwick were railway destinations from Edinburgh. The working-class day trippers and excursionists were inevitably regarded with distaste by the upper-class seaside residents and visitors, who seized on occasional episodes of drunkenness and violence to tar all such incomers with the same brush. In practice, most excursions were well organised by paternalistic employers, church organisations or the temperance movement, and the majority of working-class visitors were well behaved and appreciative (an early organiser was Thomas Cook, whose first excursion in 1841 was a railway trip from Leicester to Loughborough, for a temperance rally).

By the end of the nineteenth century, a middle class of ‘white collar’ workers had begun to emerge, with the time and money for longer holidays, and working-class day trips were also beginning to expand into overnight stays. This happened first in Lancashire, as textile workers began to acquire more disposable income, and employers acquiesced in granting (unpaid) time off from work. Tension between wealthy, middle class and working class seaside holidaymakers increased, and local authorities in seaside resorts had to decide whether to encourage working class tourism, or to try to remain ‘exclusive’. Resorts such as Blackpool went firmly down the road of catering for the working classes, and cheap boarding houses and workers’ entertainments proliferated. This led to the better off abandoning such resorts as transport options increased; the middle classes patronising further-flung resorts, out of the reach of the workers, and the rich holidaying abroad.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the expansion of the seaside holiday industry. Popular resorts acquired infrastructure, including piers, theatres, cinemas, pavilions and swimming pools. Resorts advertised themselves on their facilities and their (perceived) natural advantages. A famous poster from 1908 proclaimed, “Skegness Is So Bracing”, seeking to make a virtue of its windswept location. The rise of cars allowed greater flexibility to those who could afford them, and eventually led to the decline of rail excursions. In the twenties, sunbathing became fashionable, driven by the example of the French fashion designer (and early influencer) Coco Chanel, and acquiring a tan became a popular seaside (non)activity.

In 1938, legislation was passed granting all workers paid annual leave. This led, following World War Two, to the heyday of the British seaside holiday. A large majority of the population took to the seaside for a week or fortnight in the summer, the better off staying in hotels and the rest in boarding houses (which gradually rebranded as Guest Houses). Class distinctions were maintained, the working classes heading en masse to Blackpool, Cleethorpes, Margate, Rhyll, etc, while Devon and Cornwall became popular among the middle classes in England, and resorts in Fife – and Galloway — attracted Scots.

Even during this purple patch, however, the later relative decline of the British seaside holiday was presaged. A survey of attitudes towards holidays carried out in 1949 found that seaside visitors found traditional boarding house holidays restrictive, and facilities poor. Many would have preferred a different, more exotic holiday (with better weather), but were constrained by time and money. This began to change in the 1960s, when air travel became cheaper and package holidays to European resorts, especially in Spain, became accessible to all classes. By the end of the twentieth century, holidays had radically altered.

Figures from 2019, before the pandemic (probably temporarily) revived ‘staycations’, illustrate the contemporary pattern of holiday taking. In that year, there were 58.7 million holiday visits abroad, mostly to EU countries, with Spain still the most popular destination. By contrast, there were 46.4 million holiday trips taken within England during the same year. Just one-third were to seaside resorts, the same proportion as city breaks, and the majority were of 1 to 3 days duration. 40% of overnight stays were in hotels or motels and just 7% in guest houses or B&Bs, while nearly 50% of stays were in self-catering accommodation (holiday lets, second homes, caravans and camping). A quarter of all trips were to South West England. In Scotland, the seaside accounted for around a quarter of holiday trips, with the mountains and lochs alternative attractions. Overall, while the British seaside was still a popular destination in 2019, it was largely frequented by the middle classes enjoying second or third holidays, while main holidays were predominately taken abroad (though it must be noted that some 12% of the population took no holidays at all). The traditional working-class boarding or guest house holiday had all but disappeared, leading to economic deprivation in those resorts which had specialised in such accommodation.

So ends my ‘Cooks Tour’ (pun intended) of British seaside holidays. We will now move on to consider how Portpatrick developed as a resort, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Portpatrick as a Holiday Resort

The Nineteenth Century: In 1791, Rev John McKenzie, author of Portpatrick’s entry to the First Statistical Account of Scotland, wrote:

“The sea bathing is admirable...no situation can be better calculated for a watering-place, if the current rage for them continue to prevail as at present”.

His view was echoed by Rev Andrew Urquhart, author of the entry to the Second Statistical Account in 1845:

“The purity of the sea-water here would render Portpatrick a desirable watering-place in the summer months, if baths were erected and pains taken to improve the bathing-ground”.

However, these recommendations were not pursued at the time, as the future of Portpatrick was seen as a major port connecting the mainland to Ireland. It was not until the final quarter of the nineteenth century, when ambitions for the port had been abandoned, that attention began to turn to the potential of the town as a holiday destination.

The railway reached Portpatrick in 1862, with the opening of the line from Castle Douglas that allowed through trains from Dumfries, Carlisle and ultimately the rest of England. In 1877, the town was connected to Glasgow and Edinburgh, with the opening of the line from Girvan to Challoch Junction, near Dunragit. Such improved communications made Portpatrick accessible for tourists, and in the 1880s and 1890s, articles began to appear in the Scottish press expounding the virtues of Portpatrick as a 'watering place’.

At first, its clientele were the ‘propertied classes’, who could afford to stay in hotels, or to rent houses for the summer. By 1880, Portpatrick had four hotels. The Downshire Arms was the largest, and next to it was the Cross Keys, which later merged into its larger neighbour. Further up Main Street was the Commercial Inn, and the Crown, the only one still operating today, overlooked the harbour on North Crescent. A number of houses were available for rent, along Main Street and South and North Crescents, or on the cliffs overlooking the harbour. Some, like Fernhill and Mount Stewart, were built in the 1870s apparently specifically as (in today’s parlance) holiday lets. Others, such as Harbour House and the villas on South Crescent and Main Street, were older, but were modernised for well-off visitors. As elsewhere in the country, many were run by women, often widows assisted by unmarried daughters, such as Elizabeth Edgar, a seaman's widow who in 1891 ran a 'house to let' on South Crescent, assisted by her 40-year-old daughter Isabella. Other single female villagers found employment in the holiday trade, as domestic servants and laundresses, including Jane Smith, a former needlewoman, who in her 50s took to laundry work from her cottage in Colonel Street when the home-working embroidery industry petered out.

Visitors’ Lists published in local newspapers give a flavour of the type of holidaymaker that Portpatrick attracted in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1881, the Galloway Advertiser reported “an almost unprecedented array of fashionable names”. To give a few examples: ‘Lagwinnan’, the house at the southern end of Dunskey Street (which was much bigger then than it is now), was the summer home of Sir William Montgomery-Cunninghame, an army officer and landowner from Maybole, who had been awarded the Victoria Cross during the Crimean War and was also M.P. for Ayr Burghs. Mount Stewart was taken by the Wedderburn-Maxwell family of Glenlair near Corsock, relatives of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, and they were followed by Rev Dr James Charles, Minister of Kirkcowan, and his family. Fernhill was occupied by the family of James Drew of Doonhill near Newton Stewart, whose profession was Estate Factor. Sea Bank House, on South Crescent, was occupied by the family of George Rennie, owner of an oil foundry in Pollockshields. In 1892, Harbour House welcomed the family of Arthur French-Brewster, an Irish landowner whose sons joined the party from Eton College. Many holidaymakers travelled quite short distances from their homes in Galloway or Ayrshire, but Edinburgh and Glasgow were also well represented, along with travelers from Ireland and England.

The recreations on offer were little different to those available in Portpatrick today. The promenade, which had been constructed in the 1830s to support a tramway used in building the harbour, was the focus of the town, and it was reported that “the pier on an afternoon has quite a gay appearance”. Footpaths were maintained to Dunskey Castle and to Sandeel and Lairds Bay, and Dunskey Glen was open to visitors. Holidaymakers could experience the sublime, in the form of the violent storms that periodically battered the coast, and the rapidly deteriorating state of the abandoned harbour was an attraction and talking-point.

Dunskey Glen Walks have been a popular attraction since at least the 1880s...

...Generations of visitors have left their mark on the glen

Sea bathing was the original attraction of coastal resorts, and Sandeel Bay was a popular bathing spot. In Victorian times, the sexes were meant to be strictly segregated while bathing, with women using bathing machines, huts on wheels that were pushed into the sea to allow them to enter the water in privacy, dressed in voluminous gowns. Men, by contrast, frequently bathed naked on the open beach. How bathing was organised at Portpatrick is not reported. There were bathing machines on the beaches at Stranraer, but what happened in the seclusion of Sandeel Bay has stayed in Sandeel Bay.

Sandeel Bay was once a prominent sea-bathing spot. In the 1940s there was a tea room on the slope to the right of the picture. Fewer people bathe there now, but the author has swum there (and was heartily stung by a large jellyfish)

The tennis courts in Portpatrick were opened in 1889, and the bowling green in 1893, on the site of the former harbour station. Visitors could hire boats from the local fishermen for sightseeing or angling trips, and transport could be hired to visit local attractions such as Castle Kennedy and the Mull of Galloway. Finally, for rainy days, there was a library and reading room, situated in Trinity Hall in Colonel Street, owned by the Free Presbyterian Church.

Portpatrick also became a destination for day trips and excursions. As an example, in 1895 the Belfast Central Presbyterian Association advertised an excursion by steamer to Stranraer, followed by a coach ride to Portpatrick, returning to Belfast on the same day. Occasional railway excursions were also run.

The Early Twentieth Century: In 1900, Charles Lindsey Orr-Ewing became Laird of Dunskey (and followed Sir William Montgomery-Cunninghame as M.P. for Ayr Burghs). Orr-Ewing made improvements to Portpatrick that sought to enhance its status as a resort. In 1902 he demolished the unsightly old cottages that lined Blair Street and moved the fishing families who had lived there to new (but smaller) flats at the far end of Hill Street. In their place, he built a terrace of genteel houses that sought to attract a better class of resident. Heugh Road was constructed, and gradually acquired up-market villas. In 1904 the village gained piped water and electric light – and that sine qua non of Scottish resorts, a golf course; one of over 200 built in Scotland between 1870 and 1914. Then in 1905 the formidable Portpatrick Hotel was built on the northern cliff. The railway company played its part by increasing the number of trains on the branch line from Stranraer from two return trips per day to six (reduced to four in 1914), and extended the platform at Portpatrick station to accommodate long excursion trains.

Improvements initiated by C.L. Orr-Ewing included the genteel houses of Blair Terrace (built in 1902)...

...and the mighty Portpatrick Hotel, opened in 1905

At the same time, the characteristics of those holidaying in Portpatrick were changing. As noted above, by the early twentieth century a “white collar” lower middle class was developing, with sufficient free time and income to take an annual holiday. This group sought a better class of destination than the mass-market resorts frequented by the working classes. Portpatrick was never likely to become one of the latter. It was too small, too far from the industrial cities and, importantly, the Sabbath was scrupulously observed, meaning that there was no rail or steamer transport on Sundays, the working classes’ one day off. But it was accessible and genteel enough to attract “white-collar” holidaymakers, and boarding house accommodation began to be provided to supplement the town’s established hotels.

Some of this accommodation came from the houses previously rented by the upper middle classes. These drifted away from Portpatrick, lured by better transport links to resorts in Europe. Houses such as Mount Stewart, Lagwinnan and Carleton House (on South Crescent) became boarding houses; their housekeepers becoming landladies. Other boarding houses were purpose built, such as South Cliff (next door to Mount Stewart and opened in 1907). By 1915 there were at least eleven boarding houses in the village.

Mount Stewart (above left) was built in the 1870s and was originally a 'holiday let' for well-off visitors, before becoming a boarding house and later a licensed hotel and restaurant. South Cliff, to its right, was built in 1907 as a boarding house and is now, like much else in Portpatrick, a modern-day holiday let

Rickwood private hotel was built in the 1870s as a house for the Factor of the Dunskey Estate

During the 1900s an Improvement Committee of local worthies was established and for many years oversaw the development of the resort. An advertising committee co-ordinated publicity for the town’s hotels and boarding houses. The railway companies also sought to attract visitors through advertising and the provision of excursions. The Portpatrick & Wigtownshire Joint Railway Company published a guidebook, Tours in Galloway, each year from 1898 to 1915, which included Portpatrick among other Galloway attractions. Special train services and half-holiday excursions were run on Wednesdays and Saturdays between Portpatrick, Stranraer and Castle Kennedy, and special excursion fares could be had for trippers from Belfast and elsewhere.

We know little about those who holidayed in Portpatrick in the early twentieth century, save for a brief newspaper report from 1910 about one William Lord, a 58 year old teacher from Manchester, who was staying in a boarding house along with his wife. The couple took a walk across the cliffs to Killantringan Lighthouse, where the unfortunate Mr Lord was taken ill, and subsequently died.

Another sad death occurred in 1909, during the annual works outing held by the Ferguslie Thread Mills of Paisley. Some 2000 women and girls arrived at Portpatrick in four special trains. They were well entertained, despite poor weather, but while waiting for the return home, an 18-year old girl named Rachel Douglas fell onto the track and was killed by a train. This tragic incident was commemorated by a motif of a pair of scissors carved into the edge of the station platform (and still displayed in the grounds of Portpatrick school).

The Later Twentieth Century: The provision in Portpatrick of hotels, ‘private hotels’, boarding and guest houses and B&Bs shifted over the years, with establishments coming and going, but the basic attractions of the town as a resort changed little. Sandeel Bay remained the main bathing spot, and for a time in the 1940s boasted a tea shop and changing facilities. The only new visitor facilities established were the putting green, on land that had originally housed the Admiralty works, and was later a market garden, and the amusement arcade in the former Drill Hall. Portpatrick remained a quiet, rather middle class resort. There was little nightlife. Stranraer had two cinemas, which were doubtless patronised by holidaymakers in the evenings or on wet days, but no theatre or nightspots. In 1935, my great-uncle, Frank Dicks, who owned a general store in Stranraer, set up a dance hall, restaurant and nightclub, optimistically named the Ritz and unpromisingly housed in a former Reform school in Dalrymple Street. The venture quickly failed, and poor Uncle Frank was bankrupted. There were apparently no further attempts to provide such night entertainment in the area, but in the 1950s the Portpatrick hotel advertised “dancing to our resident band”.

In 1923, the Portpatrick & Wigtownshire Railway became part of the mighty London Midland and Scottish, which continued to promote Galloway as a holiday resort. Advertisements sold Portpatrick as “the most bracing of resorts” – a rather backhanded compliment. Regular excursion trains ran at weekends from Glasgow throughout the first half of the century, with Sunday services being introduced from 1927. However, the rise of motor transport dealt a death blow to the Stranraer to Portpatrick branch line, and in 1950 it became the first railway in Galloway to close down.

In 1945, Lagwinnan Boarding House was put up for sale, and the advertisement gives a flavour of the facilities provided in Portpatrick at the time. It had twelve bedrooms, three reception rooms, three W.C.s (one outside) – and just one bathroom. There were apparently no takers for Lagwinnan as a going concern, and much of it was subsequently demolished, the remainder becoming a private house.

During the century, self-catering accommodation grew, in particular the establishment of caravan sites on land overlooking the sea, and (for a time) on the site of the former railway station. In 1984, the Southern Upland Way was established, with its western terminus in Portpatrick, and in the 1990s, the promenade was given a facelift, with widened pedestrian and seating areas giving the village a (sort of) Continental feel.

The promenade was renovated in the 1990s. The Harbour House, in the centre of the picture, was a 'holiday let' in the late 19th Century before becoming a boarding house, and is now one of Portpatrick's six current licensed hotels

Conclusion: Portpatrick Today

I have been holidaying in Portpatrick for over fifty years – and during that time it hasn’t changed much. Shops, restaurants, guest houses and hotels have come and gone, but the core attractions are the same as they ever were. However, the recent closure of the Downshire Arms hotel seems to mark a watershed for the village. In the 1880s, the Downshire Arms was the largest hotel in Portpatrick and it was reported that visitors “would find on the table the best of everything, served in a style equal to the most fashionable London hotel”. But now it has joined the growing number of the village’s buildings that have become self-catering holiday lets.

I own a holiday home in Portpatrick myself (albeit one that is very small, and has been in my family for over sixty years) and therefore cannot be holier-than-thou about the proliferation of self-catering accommodation. It is of course a trend that has been accelerating in holiday resorts across the country, driven by a desire for more flexible, individualistic holidays, and fuelled by the rise of websites such as Airbnb. In many ways, Portpatrick appears today to be as thriving a resort as it ever was. But as self-catering takes over more and more of the village, the question of how tourism squares a with thriving local community will doubtless become more pertinent over the next few years.

 

But despite this ongoing controversy, the fact remains that Portpatrick has long had an allure for those seeking a tranquil and sublime holiday.  We will leave the last word to an unnamed correspondent from 1890:

"It may be asked, what is there to do? Well, pretty much nothing, only one never wearies of wandering along these beautiful cliffs, and looking down upon the ever-surging sea...This paper in fact could have been headed 'An Idle Holiday'. But, after all, is not a thorough rest a sine qua non of a holiday? And those requiring such will get it here to their hearts' content".

Sources Used

Cunningham R (2004) Portpatrick through the Ages. Dumfries: Alba Printers

Durie A (1994) The Development of the Scottish Coastal Resorts in the Central Lowlands, 1770-1880. The Local Historian 24(4): 206-216

Thorne HD (2005) Rails to Portpatrick. Wigton: GC Books 

Walton J (2000) The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century. Manchester University Press

Visit Britain GB Tourism Survey 2019

Census returns and Valuation Rolls available at Scotland’s People

Articles available at the British Newspaper Archive

 

The Old Statistical Account of Portpatrick by the Rev. John McKenzie (1791)

The New Statistical Account of Portpatrick, by the Rev. Andrew Urquhart (1845)

The Third Statistical Account of Portpatrick by John Muir (1960)