In rural Galloway, the nights are so clear and dark that even the gaps between the stars appear to shine.
Yet, this otherwise tranquil corner of the country has become a battleground in a debate over the future of rural Scotland.
Scotland is due a new national park by 2026 — the pledge was a key feature of the Bute House agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens — but, as the deadline for submissions approaches this Thursday, the question remains: where to put it?
When the process began in October ten areas showed an interest but after heated village hall debates, rejections from councils and protests from crofters only a handful remain.
Skye and Raasay dropped out last week after 110 farmers in the area unanimously opposed the bid at a meeting in Portree while a Wester Ross proposal was abandoned after 56 per cent of locals came down against it in a survey.
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Two further Highland offerings, Affric and Loch Ness and Ben Wyvis and Glen Affric, have withdrawn their applications this month, the latter saying the speed of the process left people feeling “ambushed”.
A bid from the Scottish Borders is proceeding despite the local council dismissing it as “half-baked”, and while Largo Bay in Fife and the Lammermuir Hills were listed as areas to voice an “early expression of interest” in October little detail has emerged since.
In a slimmed-down field, Galloway, the Tay Forest, Loch Awe and Lochaber seem to be the remaining serious contenders.
In Galloway the tension is mounting. Chris Walker, the proprietor of the Selkirk Arms hotel in Kirkcudbright, has spent much of his adult life trying to persuade holidaymakers, hurtling up from England with bikes on the back, or down from the central belt for the weekend, to turn off the motorway.
“Everybody would drive straight up the M74 heading to where they felt Scotland really started — the Highlands, the Islands, everything north of Glasgow and Edinburgh … we were this forgotten corner,” he said.
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Sitting by the hotel window in a spot where Robert Burns is said to have penned his Selkirk Grace, he notes that Galloway has attracted tourists, like the poet, for hundreds of years, just not enough of them.
He hopes national park status would cement Galloway as not a pit stop but a destination in its own right: “We have been Scotland’s best kept secret, and [with national park status] they will think we are the ‘go to’ place rather than the ‘go through’ place.”
Driving along the A75 into the sunset in the west, criss-crossing dry stone walls, moorland and lochs towards Portpatrick where the lights of Belfast glow low above the horizon, the roads are quiet and the appeal is clear.
Scotland’s natural beauty is such that draw a circle on the map almost anywhere and you have a plausible candidate for a national park — the difficulty is to not disrupt the delicate balance of the local economy.
For Stewart Wyllie, an Annan-based farmer and NFU representative for Dumfries and Galloway, implementing a national park in the relatively intensively farmed southwest, with its tens of thousands of dairy cows and machinery is “logistically terrifying”.
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Farmers across the country worry parks will bring extra red tape and planning rules such as forcing them to use traditional materials at great expense when building barns.
Even at the height of the foot and mouth crisis, where farmers had to kill hundreds of their herd, they still knew their business would survive as the government was to compensate them, according to Wyllie, 42. “This time it’s a different feeling,” he said. “It’s just anger. They feel that their business could be ended.”
However, supporters in Galloway say such fears are unfounded as rules for the park, if there are any, would be decided with the local community. They point to the English national parks in Northumberland and the Lake District — more similar to Galloway in land use than the existing national parks, Cairngorms or Loch Lomond and the Trossachs — as a model where the park has been careful to keep farmers on side.
This is not always easy.
“I wouldn’t wish a [national park] on anywhere, that’s the honest truth,” said Robert MacDonald, a farmer from Grantown-on-Spey who led a protest last month, steering a convoy of 20 tractors to the Cairngorm national park offices.
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The reintroduction of beavers was a final straw. MacDonald supported the park 20 years ago after local farmers returned enthused from a fact-finding trip to the Cevennes national park in France, where each farmer earned €3,000 more each year due to the boost to food branding.
For farmers in the Cairngorms he said, this boost never came. Instead he has watched on as rewilding projects and tourism have superseded agriculture. “There were shepherds, cattlemen, farmers, crofters, all living in glens that are now empty,” he said.
Farmers are not alone in rallying against a new national park. Some rural Scots fear designation would drive up house prices even further, exacerbating population decline as young families are priced out.
In Lochaber — a region already hotching in summer with tourists visiting the “Harry Potter” viaduct at Glenfinnan, parked up in laybys at Glen Coe or queuing for the Corran ferry — critics of the bid feel money could be better spent elsewhere.
“When the NHS has put all building projects on hold, when our roads are crumbling with massive debt, a £130 million spend over the next decade on this Green Party-led vanity project is highly inappropriate,” said Angus MacDonald, a Liberal Democrat Highland councillor. “The Highlands has over-tourism for four months a year. A new national park would just make things worse.”
Back in Galloway, on a wet evening in late February, over-tourism feels a long way off. The region attracts a respectable 300 people per square kilometre each year, a seventh of the 2,140 in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, and a tiny fraction of the 7,662 that grace the Lake District not far to the south.
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While some residents dread some kind of North Coast 500-style camper van route throttling the region, injecting life into the tourism industry may have its benefits.
“There is a presumption that national parks cost money when all the evidence is that national parks generate money,” said Rob Lucas, of the Galloway National Park Association, the body spearheading their bid.
He notes that residents of Dumfries and Galloway earn less than any other county in Scotland on average, the only rural area in the bottom ten, and after a decade of more intensive dairy farming and investment in wind power little has changed.
Snaking down the Mull of Galloway towards Scotland’s southern tip on deserted roads as winter slips into spring, there is no wonder this region is often called Scotland’s best kept secret — but to some here the best secrets are shared.
Lucas added: “A national park won’t solve everything, but it will help to move the dial.”
