Port Nessock Bay - the older name still survives in local use, and the Gaelic Port Neasaig is older still - is the last remnant of something larger. In post-glacial times, what is now the south end of the Rhins of Galloway was separated from the main peninsula by a narrow strait, with three smaller islands sitting off to the south. Sea level dropped, land rose, and the strait closed. The bay at Port Logan is the western end of that drowned channel. In 1790, the bay still held a ruined pier; the locals gathered kelp from the rocks and samphire from the coast just south. Telford's quay, completed in 1818, gave the village a deeper relationship with the sea than samphire-picking - and the bell tower at its end remains the village's signature silhouette, the first thing visible to anyone arriving by road or coming round the headland by boat.

Colonel MacDowall's improvements ran beyond the quay. Around 1788, his father had begun the Logan Fish Pond - a tidal pool cut into the rocks just north of the village, intended as a fish larder for Logan House. It was completed around 1800, with a keeper's cottage and a bathing hut, and it survives today as the Logan Fishpond Marine Life Centre, where visitors can hand-feed sea bass and mullet that have grown habituated to people over generations. Nearby, the Logan Botanic Garden - now a branch of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh - takes advantage of the Rhins' unusually mild Gulf-Stream climate to grow tree ferns, Chusan palms, and other subtropical species that ought, by Scottish latitude, to be entirely impossible. The combination is unlikely and characteristic: a Georgian fish pond, a botanic garden full of palms, and a single planned village stitching them together along the coast.

Between 2001 and 2003, the BBC adapted Port Logan into a different place entirely. The drama Two Thousand Acres of Sky, starring Michelle Collins, used the village as the fictional Hebridean island of Ronansay. Camera angles, careful editing and the village's natural isolation did the rest. A small Galloway harbour played a Highland island for three series and an enthusiastic following. In 2017, the village took another star turn, this time darker: Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan and Connor Swindells came to film The Vanishing, a thriller loosely inspired by the real-life Flannan Isles lighthouse mystery of 1900. The two productions, fifteen years apart, suggest something about Port Logan's screen appeal: a coastline, a bay, and architecture that can stand in for almost any place on the Atlantic edge of Scotland.

On 27 July 1944, the bay also became the site of a wartime tragedy that the village still remembers. Two Douglas C-47 Skytrains of the United States Army Air Forces - one bearing serial number 42-93038 - were flying north from Filton to Prestwick with wounded soldiers aboard, heading eventually for the United States. The aircraft encountered bad weather along the Galloway coast. The pilot of 42-93038 attempted to climb to clear the cliffs above Port Logan. He did not succeed. The aircraft struck the cliff side and all twenty-two passengers and crew - injured American servicemen on their way home, the men flying them, the medical staff - died on impact. They had come this far from whatever war had wounded them, and were lost on the last leg before the last leg. The cliff itself does not advertise what happened there, but the village has not forgotten.