Qualla: Port Logan

Port Logan: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James T M Towill, CC BY-SA 2.0. Colonel Andrew MacDowall, laird of Logan, built Port Logan in 1818 as an exercise in patrician imagination. He laid out a planned village along the curve of Port Nessock Bay, hired Thomas Telford - the same engineer who would dot Britain with bridges and harbours - to design a quay and a bell tower, and constructed a causewayed road leading out to them. The plan was tidy and complete. The existing villagers, who lived on the Lower Road (Laigh Row), were expected to relocate to a new Upper Road, freeing up the seaward view. Things did not go to plan. The villagers liked the shelter Telford's causeway gave them from the brisk onshore winds, and they stayed put. Most of them simply added a second storey to their cottages, so they could see over the new quay and out to sea again. It is one of the few cases in which a Scottish laird's grand design was politely declined by the people he was redesigning.

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Image: James T M Towill | CC BY-SA 2.0

Port Logan: A Bay That Used To Be a Strait

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy McCrorie, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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,...

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Image: Billy McCrorie | CC BY-SA 2.0

Port Logan: The Fish Pond and the Botanic Garden

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Port Logan: Two Thousand Acres of Sky

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beth Loft, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 di...

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Image: Beth Loft | CC BY-SA 2.0

Port Logan: A Cliff Above the Bay

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ann Cook, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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, hea...

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Image: Ann Cook | CC BY-SA 2.0