Like Castle Douglas,
GATEHOUSE OF FLEET (
www.gatehouse-of-fleet.co.uk), ten miles west of Kirkcudbright, has a distinctive long, straight main street. However, the quiet streets of Gatehouse have none of the life and bustle of Castle Douglas. By contrast, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the town was a thriving industrial centre with cotton mills, shipbuilding and a brewery. The man who made all this happen was the local laird James Murray (1727–99), but his custom-built town failed to match its better-placed rivals. By 1850 the boom was over, the town was bypassed by the railway, the mills slipped into disrepair, and nowadays tiny Gatehouse is just about sustained by tourism and forestry.
As in Castle Douglas, the sloping whitewashed High Street has a landmark clocktower, in this case an incongruous free-standing one, built in grey granite and topped by strange mitre-shaped crenellations. The
Murray Arms Hotel, the old coaching inn next to the clocktower, is where Robbie Burns wrote
Scots wha hae. From here picturesque Ann Street gives access to the wooded grounds of
Cally House Gardens (Easter– Sept Tues– Fri 2–5.30pm, Sat & Sun 10am–5.30pm;
www.callygardens.co.uk; £2). A palatial Neoclassical country mansion (now the
Cally Palace Hotel), Cally House was built in the 1760s and is proof positive of the fortune already owned by the Murray family, even before James Murray began his cotton enterprise. Back in town, the
Mill on the Fleet (April– Oct daily 10.30am–5pm; £2.50), opposite the car park by the river at the bottom of the High Street, traces the economic and social history of Gatehouse and Galloway from inside a restored grey granite bobbin mill; it also has a decent
café on the ground floor and a large second-hand bookshop on the top floor.