THE LAND THAT IS
"SCOTLANDS BEST-KEPT SECRET"

Description of Galloway's Charms
From Highways and Byways in Galloway, by C.H.Dick

He thought the village of Kirkoswald “Highland-looking". Had his acquaintance with Carrick and Galloway been longer and more intimate, I am sure he would have joined the ranks of those who protest against this kind of description when it is applied to the south-western counties, who think it a superficial sort of appreciation which says of Galloway that it is as fine, or nearly as fine, as the Highlands, that its hills, its moors, its rivers, its lochs, its villages.are “ Highland looking “, for to know Galloway intimately is to have for it an affection that can be given to no other part of the earth - there are some people who fall in love with it at sight - and to bear about with one a treasury of visions of glorious bog-myrtle; -scented moors stretching to the skirts of most memorable hills, of weird mountain desolations with no associated sounds save the croak of the raven, the screech of the hawk, and the whisper of the wind in the heath, of wooded glens where pellucid floods swirl over smooth rock or are shattered into dazzling foam among silvery boulders, of shining pastoral villages where peat-reek floats from the chimneys and its smell is carried on the air, of a far-drawn sea-board broken by little bays and estuaries, where woods embowering old-world homes come down to the edge of the waters, and one would no more say that Galloway was Highland-looking than one would say that the lady who commands one’s heart’s devotion was as adorable as Helen of Troy.


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