Sometime in the spring of 1944, Sir Winston Churchill met General Dwight Eisenhower at a small hotel called Knockinaam Lodge, tucked into a sheltered cove on the west coast of the Rhins of Galloway. The lodge had been chosen for one reason: it was almost impossible to find. The cove sits at the end of a single-track road that descends through trees to a stretch of pebble beach with cliffs on either side. There is no through-traffic. There is no village to walk through. There is only the lodge, the cove, and the open North Channel beyond. What Churchill and Eisenhower discussed there - the final plans for the D-Day landings, a few weeks later, that would change the course of the war - has long since entered public history. But for one of the most consequential meetings of the Second World War, the planners had chosen the parish of Stoneykirk, in the middle of nowhere.
Stoneykirk's deepest claim to importance long predates Churchill. At Kirkmadrine, a short distance from the village, stand the Monogram Stones - early Christian inscribed gravestones, the oldest dating from around AD 450. They are the earliest inscribed Christian gravestones in Scotland, and the oldest Christian monuments in the country outside of Whithorn, a few miles east on the other peninsula. The oldest is a pillar stone from the 5th century. All the stones were found in the immediate vicinity, suggesting Kirkmadrine was an early Christian cemetery - a community of Roman-period Christians on the very western edge of Britain, leaving Latin inscriptions in stone at a moment when most of Scotland was still pre-literate. The site is small and easy to miss. Its content is not.
Stoneykirk takes its name from its church, dedicated to St Stephen and built between the 12th and 14th centuries - probably under the patronage of the McCulloch family of Ardwell, who held land here for centuries. The McCullochs appear in some of the earliest Wigtownshire records, including a Balliol deed of 1285 and the Ragman Rolls of 1296 - the great list of Scottish nobles forced to swear fealty to Edward I of England. A family legend, relayed centuries later by US Supreme Court Justice James Iredell, holds that around 1317 Robert the Bruce knighted a Captain Cullo og Neil and made him standard-bearer and Secretary of State. Bruce granted Cullo og Neil estates around Ardwell and Killasser. His son Godfrey, the story goes, took the surname McCullog. The names McCulloch and McCullough echo down the centuries from this corner of Galloway, and even when the family legend is too tidy to be entirely true, the documentary record of McCullochs as Sheriff of Wigtownshire in 1305 confirms how early they rose to prominence here.
The parish coastline is so layered with Iron Age forts that the antiquarian Rev. George Wilson, writing in the late 19th century, simply lettered them: one north of Drumbreddan Bay, Doon Castle at Ardwell Point, Kirklauchline five miles further north, Kildonan as a double fort, Knockdoon up by Awhirk. Doon Castle is the best surviving Iron Age broch in Dumfries and Galloway. Cairns mark Doon Hill of Kildrochet. East Galdenoch carries a scheduled prehistoric settlement of 260 by 250 metres, near the Freugh airfield. At Port Spittal, a Bronze Age cist and urn turned up under a whinstone slab - bones now displayed in the Stranraer Museum. And in 1588, vessels from the Great Spanish Armada wrecked off the western coast near a bay still called Float - locally explained as 'because of the wreck of one of those Spanish ships,' though one scholarly source suggests Float is from the Norse flott, meaning a plain. At Money Point nearby, Spanish doubloons were said to have been found, lending weight to the wreck story even if the etymology is contested.
Stoneykirk runs about ten miles long and the same across, bounded on the east by Luce Bay and on the west by the North Channel - 21,500 acres of Galloway in all. Of those, 19,000 acres are arable; 375 are woodland; the rest is moor. The 1790 Statistical Account observed that trees did not thrive - the Atlantic wind shapes everything that tries to grow tall here - but oysters, lobsters, corn, cattle, potatoes, barley, oats and flax all did. Farmers improved their land with lime brought from Whitehaven in Cumbria or from Ireland, ferried in to Sandhead on Luce Bay. Today the parish supports the village of Stoneykirk itself, near the active RAF West Freugh military airfield, and the smaller settlements of Sandhead and Clachanmore. McCulloch's Coaches still operates from the village; a James King bus service runs north to Stranraer and south to Drummore. And at Knockinaam Lodge, you can still book a room and look out over the same cove that hosted Churchill and Eisenhower.
Stoneykirk parish stretches around 54.837 deg N, 4.977 deg W in the middle of the Rhins of Galloway, with the parish running about 10 miles east-west between Luce Bay and the North Channel. From the air, the Rhins shows as a distinctive double-coast peninsula, with Luce Bay's broad sweep on the east side. Glasgow Prestwick (EGPK) is the nearest sizeable airport, roughly 60 nm north-east; West Freugh (EGOY) - the RAF airfield - sits right inside the parish near Stoneykirk village. Visual landmarks: West Freugh's runway and hangars, Sandhead village curling around Luce Bay, the sheltered cove and lodge at Knockinaam on the western shore, and Kirkmadrine's small Early Christian chapel inland.