FIVE
Whaur glistenin’ sands lay streikit
Ablow the sunset sky
Noo a wan wide sea is reestin’
An’ the yammerin’ sea-birds cry,
An’ a wheengin’ win’ rings eerily
I’ the salmon nets oot-by.
DOROTHY MARGARET PAULIN, Solway Tide (1936)
THREE SHAGS SLOPE about the scarred strand, and godwits graze along the wrack line. Were it not for the former MoD factory beyond the shore, Powfoot village might be a beachcomber’s paradise but, after an explosion in the 1960s, tons of rubble were dumped over the barbed wire to be slowly sculpted into something else by the waves and winds.
The better of the two beaches has an intertidal dyked paddling pool, and there were stake nets there for centuries, but they too are gone. In the 1980s, when I was jobless, I often pilfered flounders from their mesh. The fishermen only wanted salmon and left a few flounders – poor man’s plaice –flip-flopping in death’s anteroom for me to scavenge. I was told they were stuffed with Vitamin B12. They weren’t for the gourmet, but they’d do until my giro came.
Today scintillating swifts skim the sea, like a shoal of tiny hovercrafts, whimsical in their synchrony. We hear golfer’s clubs clanking in their caddy on the links beyond the gorse. Gone are the many visitors who once disgorged from trains in Cummertrees a mile away, for the seaside or to relax along a string of ornamental man-made lochs. Nowadays there’s a circular walk among the mature trees and shrubs that colonized the silted-up waterway. At Cummertrees stand the only Edwardian three-storey houses of their kind in Scotland, a reminder of the local gentry’s plan for a ‘Blackpool of the North’ at the beginning of the 20th century. The lost resort.
A sanderling sings a sea shanty, and waders twitter and tinkle to the phantoms of the firth beside a tar-boiled lane flatter than Holland. The scrubland crackles. A tractor shooms past Killers Wynd, Priestwood and Howcreek. The wind often howls across many miles of sea to these parts where pink thrift blooms, but it’s down to a whisper this glorious day. There are no verticals: just sea, sky and infinity in a dizzying dazzle, past where salt-panners once laboured.
When travel writers William Daniell and Richard Ayton passed by on their Voyage Around Great Britain in 1814, they came upon Powhillon, a cluster of a dozen mud huts.
‘Yet in these miserable hovels I found the people exceedingly decent in their manners, with their minds improved and refined by education...highly civilised, intelligent, and moral,’ wrote Ayton. ‘There was not a man or woman in the village that could not read and write, nor a single hut without a book.’ Powhillon is now a farm owned by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.
We reach Brow Well, a former spa immortalised by Robert Burns, who came here to bathe and take the mineral waters, a prescription that hastened his death. He was thin as a rake, gaunt, shaky and weary when he visited Ruthwell manse for tea. The minister’s daughter, Agnes Craig, reportedly, offered to draw the curtains to keep the sun out of his eyes, but the bard replied: ‘Let the sun shine in upon us, my dear young lady; he has not now long to shine for me.’
When he was 12, the author Allan Cunningham saw the bard return from Brow to his house in Dumfries, and wrote: ‘The ascent to his house was steep, and the cart stopped at the foot of the Mill-hole Brae; when he alighted, he shook much and stood with difficulty; he seemed unable to stand upright. He stooped as if in pain and walked tottering towards his door: his looks were hollow and ghastly, and those who saw him then expected never to see him again.’ (James A Mackay, Burns Lore of Dumfries and Galloway, 1988)
The Southern Scottish Counties Burns Association runs an annual service at the Brow Well to commemorate his passing. The Brow Inn, where Burns stayed for three weeks, was demolished in 1863.
We make for Ruthwell church, not to say our prayers but to rewind to the golden years of the kingdom of Northumbria –and a remarkable piece of Christian heritage, an ancient Anglian cross that bears the earliest extant piece of written English, the 18-foot tall, eighth-century Ruthwell Cross. When the church is closed the key is kept in a blue box outside the adjacent bungalow.
In 1640 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland denounced the cross as an idolatrous monument. It had survived the incursions of sea-rovers, but Reformers viewed it as a Papish totem pole to be vandalised and dumped. However, a succession of forward-thinking ministers saved it. Gavin Young broke it in three and laid it in a pit in the kirk, and the congregation sat on it for a century and a half. Then along came the Rev. Duncan, who reconstructed it and erected it in his glebe. Later the Rev. James McFarlan stopped it being moved to Edinburgh by knocking part of the church wall down to hide it. There is a piece of it missing, alas. Robert Nicol, the parish minister in the 1980s, told me he lived in hope that someday he would pop into someone’s byre and see it above a door being used as a lintel.
Visitors come from around the world now to see the cross, and to stop at the Savings Bank Museum. For Duncan founded the world’s first savings bank in Ruthwell in 1810. The TSB planned to shut it down and move it to Edinburgh in 2022, but there was a successful protest.
Seventeen saltpanners were swept to their deaths in a flash flood in 1627. Thirteen bodies were recovered and were buried in Ruthwell kirkyard.
 
