Sorbie sits midway between Wigtown and Whithorn on the A714, the main road through the Machars. Farming is the principal industry, as it has always been. The parish church, dating from around 1755, is a large T-plan structure that has lost its roof. Millisle Church, a kilometre west of Garlieston, was designed by Alan Stewart, the 10th Earl of Galloway, who lived from 1835 to 1901. The Wigtownshire Railway opened a junction at Millisle in 1876, and Sorbie railway station served the village from then until the line closed in 1964. The shape of the village is the shape of its history: a few crossroads, a kirk, a hall, the bones of older settlements scattered through the surrounding fields.

One mile east of the village stands Sorbie Tower, the ancient seat of Clan Hannay. A modest motte beside the tower marks where an earlier medieval stronghold once stood. The Hannays held this ground for centuries, weathering the feuds and shifting allegiances of Border Scotland. The tower itself is a four-storey late-16th-century structure that fell into ruin after the family lost it in the 17th century and has more recently been stabilised by the Clan Hannay Society as a focal point for descendants worldwide. The site is small, but it carries the surprising emotional weight that ancestral places always carry; on a Saturday in summer, you might see visitors with American or Australian accents standing very quietly inside its roofless walls.

When the Earl of Galloway decided in the mid 18th century to build Galloway House, his grand new seat between Garlieston Bay and Rigg Bay, there was a problem: the village of Carswell occupied part of the proposed grounds. He moved its residents to the new planned settlement of Garlieston nearby. Within Galloway House Gardens today, a few cottage ruins still mark where Carswell used to be. The arrangement says a lot about who had power and who did not in Georgian Galloway; the people of Carswell did not get a vote on whether they wanted to live there. Their descendants, by and large, became the residents of Garlieston's tidy crescents, and the old village faded into estate-garden archaeology.

For many years a large creamery operated beside Sorbie railway station, with some of its products shipped out through the port at nearby Garlieston. The creamery closed in the 1990s. Galloway Granite took over the site for a while, and has since relocated to Newton Stewart, leaving the works in dereliction. It is the small, ordinary story of rural industry in Scotland's quiet corners: arrival, briefly bustling decades, slow withdrawal. Out on the coast at Eggerness, an Iron Age promontory fort still grips the rocks above the sea, and at Doon Hill, just below the highest point of the parish, the double-banked earthen ramparts of an older fort outline a vanished community. The newer ruins join the older ones, the same long roll-call of arrival and departure.