South by southwest
From lofty summits to southerly seas, walk to the fingertips of Scotland on a weekend in Galloway.
Our grand tour begins! And it’s started somewhere awful...
THE RANGE OF the Awful Hand is poised. Crabbed over the landscape with high knuckles and long, disjointed fingers, it waits to extend its welcome to visitors to southern Scotland. Not many people come this far west, to a chunk of land that bulges into the Irish Sea between Cumbria and the Highlands of Scotland. But they should.
The Range of the Awful Hand refers specifically to the central upland of soaring spurs, so called for its vague resemblance to a mutilated hand from above. (The wobbly little finger is particularly out of joint.) But the whole outlying area of Galloway has something tentacular about it. Two peninsulas – the Whithorn and the Mull – stretch claw-like past the Solway Firth towards Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, as if searching for a hand-hold in the glassy sea. In a single weekend you can reach the tip of Galloway’s highest mountain one day, and walk to its most southerly, salt-licked point the next.
The tallest peak of the Awful Hand is Merrick, a 2766-foot (843m) high knuckle on the index finger. Starting by Loch Trool, a rocky path inches up alongside Buchan Burn – its percussive trickle soon the only sound around. This is Forestry Commission land, and the path to the mountains first burrows through a plantation thick with dark spindly trunks and the smell of sweet pine. On the other side the end of the forested world is marked by
an inscribed stone in the ground: the Montane Zone. The pines vanish and the bright light of the mountains floods in. Now its dwarf willow, mossy saxifrage, thrift and juniper left clinging delicately to the thin soil.
Merrick is reached via the thumb of Benyellary – a fine vantage point in its own right – and an elegant boomerang ridge that sweeps up to the summit trig point. From here Merrick’s views point in all directions. It isn’t just the Range of the Awful Hand that bubbles and simmers in the sightline, but all of the Galloway Forest hills – some slinking off towards the silver sea in the west, some rising craggy and solid, and others cradling jewels of lochans in their dark hollows. It’s these last that line the way home.
Walking off Merrick’s tussocky eastern flank the route takes a slow dance to the glistening footprint of Loch Enoch and waltzes along a daisy chain of smaller lochs. The point on the map marked ‘Murder Hole’ passes cloaked in green and blue, an innocent end to a beautiful day.
The town of Newton Stewart with its local market and riverside setting makes a fine overnight springboard from the mountains to the sea. The Mull of Galloway is just an hour south of town, but it may as well be light-years away. The Mull is at the very tip of a long finger of land, reaching so far into the sea that it seems to drift and bob on the undertow, at risk of being cast adrift at any moment. The white-washed lighthouse and spectacularly-sited café are popular attractions, but it’s the winged visitors that take centre stage.
From the lighthouse, a figure of eight footpath strokes the monumental sea cliffs where guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and shags nest during spring and summer. Their vertical world is most impressive on the west side of the peninsula, where cliffs look like they’ve dropped from the hands of chisel-wielding giants, rough-hewn and outsized. Inland, wheatears, stonechats and twite can be seen thrumming over the narrow lifeline of grassland and heath before the path plunges down to the sea once more. This eastern side is gentler
– beaches scattered with pink rocks clad in lime-bright lichen give way to grassy earth sloping ever more precipitously into the waves.
Do pause a while at the end of this slender finger of land. Belonging mostly to the sea, it often brushes up against passing marine traffic: porpoises, dolphins, Atlantic grey seals, and – if you’re lucky – minke whales. Beyond these vanishing glimpses of sea creatures are the more solid sights of the high Cumbrian fells, the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. Here, the world is at your fingertips.