Locals call it the Shire. The county next door is the Stewartry. The shorthand goes back six and a half centuries, to the day in 1369 when Archibald the Grim - Earl of Douglas, hard man of the wars with England - was handed the eastern half of Galloway and appointed a steward to administer it. The western half stayed with the king's sheriff, and so became known as the Shire of Wigtown. The two names stuck. Wigtownshire occupies the western end of Scotland's southwest corner, an oddly shaped county with a hammer-headed peninsula at one end and a triangular peninsula at the other, two enormous bays cutting between them, and on a clear day, three other countries visible from its higher ground.
The deep history of Wigtownshire runs sideways across the Irish Sea more than it runs east into Scotland. In 1065, when an exiled king named Echmarcach mac Ragnaill died, he carried the title Rex Innarenn - King of the Rhinns - on his death notice. He had previously ruled Dublin and the Isle of Man. The western Rhins had been firmly aligned with Man for generations, with Norse and Gaelic-Norse settlement names spreading along the coastal lands of southwest Scotland. The whole area became a semi-autonomous sub-kingdom, the Lordship of Galloway, which retained a degree of independence from the Scottish crown until Alan of Galloway died in 1234 and the territory was finally pulled fully into Scotland. Most of Wigtownshire was still Gaelic-speaking at the beginning of the 16th century, three hundred years after that absorption. Some things take a long time to change.
The geography is unusual. Wigtownshire borders the Irish Sea to the west, the Solway Firth to the south, Ayrshire to the north, and the Stewartry to the east. The western 'hammer-head' peninsula is the Rhins of Galloway, split from the mainland by Loch Ryan in the north and Luce Bay in the south. Its tip is the Mull of Galloway, the southernmost point in Scotland. Across Luce Bay lies the Machars, a triangular peninsula of low hills and small lochs - Dernaglar, Whitefield, Castle, Mochrum - ending at Burrow Head. Inland between the two peninsulas, on the fields near the Dunragit village and Droughduil Mote, lies one of the most important Stone Age sites in Scotland: a triple ring of huge timber circles, the outer one 300 metres across. That is almost six times the diameter of Stonehenge. Built around 4,500 years ago (c.2500 BC), the henge was a ceremonial centre for southwest Scotland's early farming communities. Nothing of it stands above ground today, but aerial photography revealed the postholes in patterns the eye on the ground could not see.
In March 2011, a metal detectorist walking a cultivated field near Garlieston, in Sorbie parish, turned up something unexpected: a gold lunula. These crescent-shaped neck ornaments date to around 2300 to 2200 BC and are thought to have been symbols of power. It was the first Scottish gold lunula found in over a hundred years. The piece is decorated around its edges with incised and punched zigzags, lines, and dots, and the metal contains 11% silver and 0.5% copper. It had been cut up and folded, and the surviving pieces amount to less than a third of the original collar. Stranraer Museum and the Wigtownshire branch of the University of the Third Age walked the field looking for more. Historic Scotland commissioned a geophysical survey. Nothing else came to light. The lunula's burial, four millennia ago, remains its own small mystery.
Modern Wigtownshire has had a complicated administrative life. Elected county councils were established in Scotland in 1890, and Wigtownshire County Council first met at Wigtown County Buildings on 22 May 1890. Annual meetings stayed at Wigtown by tradition, but ordinary meetings rotated through Stranraer and Newton Stewart. The council later set up its main offices in Stranraer, closer to the largest population. In 1975 the county was abolished as an administrative unit under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, and the area became part of the Dumfries and Galloway region. Further reform in 1996 saw the Wigtown district itself dissolved, with functions passing to the unitary Dumfries and Galloway Council. The Beeching cuts in 1965 closed the Portpatrick Railway and the Castle Douglas line, which forced Stranraer's rail traffic onto a longer route via the Glasgow South Western Line. The ferries to Northern Ireland that once left Stranraer harbour now leave from Cairnryan, a few miles up Loch Ryan.
The county has produced a varied roll of notable people. Gavin Maxwell, born at the House of Elrig in 1914 and dying in 1969, wrote Ring of Bright Water and shaped a generation's relationship with British wildlife. His grandfather Sir Herbert Maxwell, 7th Baronet, was a novelist, essayist, artist, antiquarian, and horticulturalist - a 19th-century polymath of the kind Galloway estates occasionally produced. Janet Donald, born around 1825, emigrated to New Zealand and became a church leader there. Benjamin Boyd left Wigtownshire to become a controversial entrepreneur and politician in colonial Australia in the 1830s and 1840s. Archibald McBryde sat in the United States House of Representatives in the early 19th century. Most recently, Graeme Parker - born in 1982 and known online as The Hoof GP - has turned the cattle hoof-trimming trade into a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers. From Iron Age henges to internet farriers in nine quiet centuries: that is Wigtownshire.
Centred around 54.83°N, 4.75°W in southwest Scotland - the historic county runs from the Mull of Galloway in the south to the Ayrshire border in the north, and from the Irish Sea coast west to the River Cree east. The Rhins of Galloway peninsula and the Machars peninsula are the two most distinctive features, separated by the great inlet of Luce Bay. Cairnryan on Loch Ryan is now Scotland's main ferry port for Northern Ireland (Larne and Belfast). Visible from cruising altitude in clear weather. Nearest airports: West Freugh (EGOY) on the Rhins, Prestwick (EGPK) on the Ayrshire coast. The MoD Luce Bay weapons range covers a large block of airspace - check NOTAMs. Cruise around 3,500-5,500 ft across the county for the best view of the two peninsulas, Loch Ryan with its ferry traffic, and on clear days, the Antrim and Down coasts of Northern Ireland to the west and the Isle of Man to the south.