Bog Myrtle & Peat

I don’t live inside the area put forward to be “Galloway National Park”. The proposed boundary takes a loop around my house, surrounding it on three sides but avoiding Dalbeattie as if there were some kind of illness contained in the small, dwindling industrial town on the Urr.

I’ve grown up and lived almost my entire life within five miles of Dalbeattie, and I’d be the first to concede that it’s tougher, rougher and muckier than many of the more glamorous towns in Galloway. In its heyday, Dalbeattie was a quarry town; a mill town and a manufacturing hub for the area. When I went to University in Glasgow, a friend from Crossmichael overheard me introducing myself at a party. She pulled me to one side and said “don’t tell people you’re from Dalbeattie”, as if my social kudos would evaporate in the face of this dirty secret. Luckily, I am more than capable of evaporating my social kudos through a wealth of other methods, and I remain inexpressibly proud to be from Dalbeattie.

When they drew a map to designate a Biosphere in Galloway, the line was based upon river catchments which rise from the Galloway hills. That’s part of the designation’s ethos – it works in unison with landscapes from the hilltops to the marine environment. Like the Dee and the Cree, the headwaters of the river Urr are included in the designation – but as it approaches Dalbeattie, the boundary swerves west from the river towards Castle Douglas. Only half the Urr is designated – this flies in the face of a “catchment-based” designation, but the omission is neither here nor there – I don’t know anybody who understands what the Biosphere actually does, and I certainly don’t wish we’d been included. However, it does raise questions about maps and designated areas in which certain places are promoted and others are left behind.

As it stands, Dalbeattie has been left out of the Biosphere and the proposed National Park boundary. But Dalbeattie is very much at the heart of Galloway, and if vast resources are going to be pumped into the area, what will become of rumps like this which are ignored for no particular reason? In its current state, Dalbeattie is at something of a loss. If it wasn’t for the sawmill, a mountainbike trail and a few small quarries, there would be almost nothing in the town these days. You could reasonably argue that this place needs help and direction far more urgently than more affluent areas like Kirkcudbright and the Glenkens (which are “inside” the Park proposals). You’d think that if National Parks really were a mechanism for rural regeneration, Dalbeattie should be first in the queue. But there is a suspicion that other landscapes are subjectively more beautiful, more deserving – better suited for people to retire and enjoy the serenity of an unspoiled landscape. That’s where the geography of this issue starts to get muddled, because if designation helps the neediest rural communities, it should take a warts-and-all approach to landscapes – without just cherry-picking the bonnie bits.

During the first phase of discussions about a National Park in Galloway, there was some controversy about a definition of the place – particularly in terms of defining a boundary. To some extent, this definition grew or shrank according to where the various campaigners lived and whether or not they wanted to be included. But aside from ancient Brittonic boundaries which bagged and swelled throughout the Dark Ages and into the Medieval period, there is a very clear and recent precedent for where Galloway is – specifically in the counties of Wigtownshire and Kirkcudbrightshire. That’s Galloway, and it’s pretty difficult to argue with that.

The current National Park proposal includes most (but not all) of Wigtownshire, but the boundary performs a strange shimmy around parts of the Stewartry without any particular rationale. Importantly, it also includes dollops of South and East Ayrshire which often feel like another country for those of us who live on the Solway coast. Owing to our rubbish transport infrastructure, it’s quicker for me to drive deep into Northumberland than it would be for me to drive to Girvan (and that’s if the main road to and from Galloway at Dumfries isn’t completely gridlocked with traffic at the Cuckoo Bridge roundabout). If you want to get to Ayrshire, you’re often better going to Kilmarnock and coming down from the north – after all, that’s what the train does.

It’s easy to get bogged into localisms here and reduce wider and more interesting ideas to the point of community council pedantry – but big ideas always start local, and there’s an important point at hand – if this place is designated as a National Park, there will be an immediate shift in the meaning of what Galloway is. This place is understood as a single entity – but designation under the current terms will mean parts of Galloway will receive the benefits of a Park, but others won’t. Oddly enough, parts of Ayrshire will get more help for “being Galloway” than certain parts of Galloway will. A two-tier Galloway gets confusing, and while this is not to argue against designation on account of a draft map – it feels important to remember that National Parks express a sense of innate coherence. Chopping and changing Galloway into a mosaic of “in-bits” and “out-bits” will brighten certain areas with celebrity, but there’s a risk that the rest will be cast into ever deepening shade.

The name “Galloway” already carries considerable clout. As a word, it’s in demand. Despite the fact that we’re meant to be “Dumfries and Galloway”, I’ve been able to count thirty businesses in Dumfriesshire who use the word Galloway in their branding – and precisely zero businesses in Galloway who use the word Dumfries in theirs. Case in point; I write this note having spent part of today at the Galloway Country Fair, deep in the very definite heart of Dumfriesshire. 

And that’s just it – Galloway sounds beautiful. It conjures up associations of cosiness, woodsmoke and hairy cows; it’s a marketing executive’s dream – and yet the name is much more than a gimmick. It has some profound and important meanings for local people, and if “our” landscape is going to be launched onto the global stage as a tourist destination, it has to be represented as we ourselves experience it. In that sense, we need to be clear from the outset that it’s not really “Galloway National Park” at all… it’s just “a National Park in southwest Scotland with a snappy, evocative name”. The more that word Galloway is bent to fit a few selected landscapes, the more it feels like an attempt to cash in on a marketing device without fully understanding the rich, prickly, vulnerable reality of this place.