My Dad and I visited a neighbouring farmer to talk about local history. My Dad is a history boff and writes articles for a local magazine. We set off after buying his paper at the local village shop and trundled up the long gravel road to the farm. It sits up high on the hill looking over the valley below and across to the village of New Galloway. It's a beautiful setting and a farm I have always wanted to visit. It's an old place, like many of the farm settlements in the area and they haven't changed much from the time they were built, some 200 or 300 years ago. The walls are thick local stone, usually painted white. These farms are dotted all around the green countryside, a constant reminder of older times and a history long past, but the lifestyle still lingers in these rural homes. Farming and hard work combined with tradition, and even some superstition.
These farms have wonderful names like Killochy, Torwatltie, Torwilkie, Barnshalloch. Beautiful old names with their own individual meaning, in a language long gone.
It is a place not much visited by tourists, not busy like the Lake District just a couple of hours away by car, and just as beautiful. And so it retains a sense of self, not chocolate boxed or set in aspic. But it has its own glamour - it was here that Outlander's Sam Heughan was brought up and went to school.
After a long chat about bad men roaming the countryside in the 17th century and the awful deeds carried out on the local farmers, my Dad and I drove back home for some lunch. Our farm is much like all the other local ones in this area, small and old and not much changed. You can sit a while amongst the stones and fall back in time easily. Just like Outlander's Claire Randall. It's not hard to imagine 200 or 300 years falling away.
