The village sits six miles south of Dumfries in the historical county of Kirkcudbrightshire. The hill of Criffel, 1,866 feet, rises two and a half miles to the south and dominates the skyline for miles around in every direction. On clear days from New Abbey you can see across the Solway to the hills of Cumbria. Two small streams thread through the houses: the New Abbey Pow, which runs into the Nith estuary, and the Sheep Burn. The village has the ordinary furniture of a working Scottish parish - a saw mill, a hotel, a village shop, a coffee shop, a primary school, a doctor's surgery, a village hall, a bowling green, and the football pitch at Maryfield Park where Abbey Vale FC play. The Roman Catholic church of St Mary's, designed by the New Abbey-born architect Walter Newall, closed in 2013 and is now the Thomas Bagnall Centre, hosting occasional retreats and Mass.

Sweetheart Abbey stands at the village's centre, its roofless red sandstone nave open to the weather. Lady Dervorguilla of Galloway founded it in 1273 in memory of her husband John Balliol, who had died five years earlier. She kept his embalmed heart close to her until she died in 1290 and was buried with it at the high altar she had paid for. The abbey was a daughter house of nearby Dundrennan, built in the Early English style by Abbot Henry and his monks in the local deep-red sandstone. It survived almost intact through the Wars of Scottish Independence - Edward I of England actually stayed at the abbey himself in 1300 while campaigning - until the Reformation finally closed it. The last monks died in 1624. The ruins remain one of the most photographed sights in Galloway.

Just outside the village is Loch Kindar, which contains a crannog - one of the artificial wooden islands that southwest Scotland used as defensible homesteads in the Iron Age and well into the medieval period. The remains of Kirk Kindar, the parish church until just after 1633, stand on an island in the loch. When the parish church was suppressed, the function was transferred to the refectory of the closed Sweetheart Abbey, so the village kept its religious centre even as the buildings around it changed use. The New Abbey Corn Mill, a working watermill at the southern end of the village, is now in the care of Historic Environment Scotland. Local government reform in 1975 abolished Kirkcudbrightshire as an administrative county; New Abbey was one of five parishes folded into the Nithsdale district of the new Dumfries and Galloway region.

For so small a place, New Abbey has produced an unusual roster. Sir William Paterson, the Dumfriesshire-born banker who in 1694 founded the Bank of England, was buried in the village in 1719. The founding director of the Bank of England lies beneath Scottish soil because he came home to die. Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937), one of the four painters known as the Scottish Colourists, was a friend of the Stewart family at Shambellie House on the village's western edge and a frequent visitor. The activist and teacher Jane Hannay was born here. James MacKenzie won the Victoria Cross for bravery. And Dougie Sharpe, a Scottish League international footballer, served Queen of the South for many seasons in the club's top-flight days. A small village, but the place keeps producing people who turn up elsewhere doing remarkable things.

The abbey ruins still dominate the skyline. The Corn Mill still grinds for visitors in summer. Criffel still gathers cloud and breaks it. Two burns still cross the village. The Stewarts' house at Shambellie, just to the west, was for thirty years the National Museum of Costume, which closed in 2013 and stands quiet now behind its trees. The Trossachs are far north of here, and the Highlands further still - this is the deep south of Scotland, the part that gets called the Lowlands but lifts into hills that don't quite settle. New Abbey is small, weathered, and recognisable from a distance by the bell tower of an abbey whose founder is supposed, still, to be sleeping somewhere beneath the nave with her husband's heart.