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.
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| 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.
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| Dunskey Glen Walks have been a popular attraction since at least the 1880s... |
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| ...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.
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| 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.
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| Improvements initiated by C.L. Orr-Ewing included the genteel houses of Blair Terrace (built in 1902)... |
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| ...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.
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| 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 |
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| 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.
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| 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
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