Between 1996 and 1998, archaeologists from the University of Glasgow dug into the ground as William Grant's distillery expanded, and found that people had been there for millennia. There were burnt mounds from the late third and early second millennia BC, an Iron Age trackway, and - rarer than the rest - a medieval moated enclosure. Moated houses were homes for minor aristocracy; about five thousand four hundred are known across mainland Britain, but only around 120 of those lie in Scotland. The archaeologists wondered if this one might have belonged to someone connected to the Bruce family, given that Robert the Bruce himself was born at Turnberry, just a few miles up the coast. Half a mile north of the river estuary, in level fields of Girvan Mains Farm, two Roman camps sit waiting. A fragment of late first-century glass from one of them suggests they were bases for Agricola's campaigns of 78-84 AD - possibly bridgeheads for a Roman descent on Ireland that, in the end, never happened.

Knockcushan Gardens, in the centre of town, contains an old stone called the Hill of Justice. A plaque records that King Robert the Bruce - by then Earl of Carrick and victor at Bannockburn - held a court here in 1328, the year before his death. The McKechnie Institute, an Italianate building paid for by two local businessmen, Robert and Thomas McKechnie, opened in 1889 and still hosts displays of local art and history. Up the coast, Culzean Castle sits on its basaltic cliff. Down the coast, at Bennane Head, are the caves where the legendary murderer and cannibal Sawney Bean is said to have lived before being captured and executed in Edinburgh - a story that may be entirely invented, but which the Carrick coast tells anyway, in the way coasts tell their stories.

Just north of Girvan, on the Grangestone Industrial Estate, William Grant & Sons have run a distillery since 1964. Nestlé operates a chocolate factory there too; the chocolate is shipped down to York and ends up inside Kit Kats and Yorkie bars. Walk past the harbour and you may also notice a memorial honouring 31 crew members of the French cargo ship Longwy, torpedoed off the coast of Stranraer on 4 November 1917 in the First World War. Two of the French sailors, Adolphe Harre and Samuel Brajeul, lie in Doune Cemetery. The memorial is one of those small post-war additions to a Scottish coastal town that reaches across the Channel to recognise that the dead came from somewhere too.

Girvan's Traditional Folk Festival, which began in its current form in 1975 and runs over the Mayday weekend, is one of Scotland's longest-running folk gatherings. The Festival of Light, organised by CRAG community arts each October, builds up to a river of light lantern procession through the old town and a shorefront performance. Children spend six weeks making lanterns; on the night, they walk through the streets carrying them. The town's other quiet point of pride is its twinning with Torcy, in Seine-et-Marne. The link honours Sir Thomas Huston, a Scottish knight from Girvan who fought for the French during the Hundred Years War and was granted the fiefdom of Torcy after the capture of Meaux in 1439. A small Scottish town and a small French town, formally linked by a six-century-old act of soldiering, still send each other delegations.