Scotland · Region
61 places in Dumfries and Galloway, from the deepest prehistory to the medieval world.
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Cairn (a mound of piled stones, often covering a burial) Holy is the site of two Neolithic (the first farming age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) chambered…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Laggangairn’s stones link a setting from before written records reached Britain to early Christian crosses and a medieval Whithorn pilgrimage route…
Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
The Ruthwell Cross is a stone Anglo-Saxon cross probably dating from the 8th century, when Ruthwell: now in Scotland: was part of the Anglo-Saxon K…
Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
St Ninian’s Cave is a Catholic pilgrimage site in Physgill Glen where early-medieval carved stones, rockfall-altered geology and modern film histor…
Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Whithorn was the location of the first recorded Christian church in Scotland: Candida Casa, the 'White/Shining House': built by Saint Ninian around…
Minor monument · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Denbie’s dated 1775 pigeon house turns estate food supply into architectural display, combining an octagonal lantern, J C datestone and nesting box…
Minor monument · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
A plain sandstone cross marks the lost village of Preston, whose population fell from a settled community to one inhabitant by 1844.
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
A Roman marching camp's ditch cuts clean through Broadlea henge: a circular enclosure formed by a bank and an inner ditch: entering by the north-we…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Buittle combines a major Galloway motte-and-bailey castle complex, with an earth mound and an enclosed yard, with evidence of occupation from the M…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Caerlaverock is the UK’s only triangular castle, retaining a moat, great gatehouse and Renaissance lodging amid a history of sieges, rebuilding and…
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Cairnderry chambered cairn: a Neolithic burial mound built around a stone chamber, dating from the late Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC in Britain:…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Cardoness Castle is a remarkably preserved fifteenth-century Galloway tower house whose MacCulloch history, Gordon feud and state protection make i…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Carsluith Castle is a sixteenth-century Galloway tower house whose Lindsay and Brown history, Catholic recusancy and surviving hall-and-stair archi…
Sacred place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Only the foundations remain of Chapel Finian, a small chapel built between the 10th and 11th centuries on an old raised beach at Corwall Port, on t…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Comlongon Castle is an exceptionally complete south-west Scottish tower house, where Murray lordship, rich internal defensive detail and a later ba…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Cruggleton Castle is a rare multi-period coastal stronghold where excavations revealed occupation from the Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman…
Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumfries and Galloway
On the south side of Ardwell Point, where the land juts into the North Channel on the Rhins of Galloway, the remains of Doon Castle broch (a tall c…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Drumlanrig Castle is a major late-seventeenth-century Scottish Renaissance house whose pink sandstone architecture, designed landscape, art collect…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Of the three stones that once formed the alignment at Drumtroddan, only one still stands. The others lie fallen on the ground, set in a line runnin…
Sacred place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Dundrennan Abbey is a remarkably legible Cistercian ruin whose disciplined Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Gothic) architecture…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Easthill's ring is short of a stone. Eight survive in an oval roughly three and three-quarter miles south-west of Dumfries, and a ninth is thought…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Twenty-six standing stones curve in a crescent above the bank of the White Esk near Eskdalemuir, in Dumfries and Galloway. The gap in the ring is n…
Fortified place · Roman
Dumfries and Galloway
Roughly seven acres of Roman fort lie buried on the eastern bank of the River Dee, opposite the hamlet of Glenlochar in the parish of Balmaghie. Fo…
Sacred place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Glenluce Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation in Galloway whose post-Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the monasteries) seizure, Ken…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
At the centre of an oval ring of 29 stones, two miles east of Creetown in Dumfries and Galloway, a single tall pillar stands upright. This arrangem…
Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumfries and Galloway
Grennan Hill rises outside the village of Penpont in Dumfries and Galloway, and it carries on its summit the remains of an Iron Age (from about 800…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Hoddom Castle is a large Annandale tower house whose Marian-era sieges, later courtyard expansion and surviving watchtower show how Border fortific…
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Kirkmadrine preserves three sixth-century Latin memorials naming early Christian priests, then traces continued devotion through later slabs and a…
Sacred place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Lincluden’s ruins record the transformation of Galloway’s first nunnery into a richly endowed collegiate church: a church staffed by a college of p…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Lochmaben Castle anchors the Bruce lordship of Annandale and records centuries of border conflict, royal rebuilding and repeated sixteenth-century…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
On the shore of the Solway Firth, near where the Kirtle Water empties into the estuary, a single weathered granite boulder stands roughly 7 feet ta…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
A low platform was built up out of the ground beside Eskdalemuir before the twelve stones of the Loupin Stanes were set in an oval on top of it, at…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
MacLellan’s Castle is a late sixteenth-century Scottish L-plan tower house whose unfinished rooms and ‘Laird’s Lug’ reveal elite domestic life in K…
Tomb or burial place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Six burial cairns stand grouped together in the countryside of Dumfries and Galloway, two of them holding a particular importance for archaeologist…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Morton combines a fortified Nith Valley promontory with the comforts of a later hunting lodge, now dramatically isolated by an eighteenth-century a…
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
The Mote of Mark was a high-status sixth- and seventh-century fortified workshop in Rheged, with imported goods and evidence for skilled metalworking.
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
The Motte of Urr preserves the earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks and ditches rather than built up in stone) of a twelfth-century baronia…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Orchardton is Scotland’s only cylindrical tower house, a deliberate fifteenth-century revival of an obsolete form within a later, more domestic tow…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
A small sandy bank rises out of the peat-covered valley of the Crooks Pow stream, four kilometres south-west of Dumfries, and it is on this slight…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Repentance Tower is a rare mid-sixteenth-century Border watchtower, built for warning rather than living and still marked by its enigmatic ‘REPENTA…
Settlement · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Rispain Camp is one of Scotland’s major Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) sites, where unusually well-preserved ramparts and excav…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Sanquhar Castle is a thirteenth-century Nith Valley stronghold whose Crichton ownership, ruinous decline and incomplete nineteenth-century restorat…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Sorbie Tower is the ancestral stronghold of Clan Hannay, a late-sixteenth-century fortified house whose surviving lower levels preserve a rare Gall…
Sacred place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
St Queran’s Well preserves a continuing Scottish holy-well tradition, where coins, pins and ribbons have been offered from at least the nineteenth…
Sacred place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Sweetheart Abbey preserves the personal memorial of Dervorguilla of Galloway and John de Balliol, and traces how a Cistercian house shaped the farm…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Threave Castle is a powerful record of Black Douglas lordship in Galloway, combining a 14th-century tower house with one of Britain’s earliest purp…
Fortified place · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Tibbers Castle preserves a rare Scottish example of a timber earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) castle…
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Tongland Abbey records a little-documented Premonstratensian community in Galloway, where uncertain foundation evidence, a troubled late-medieval d…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Nineteen granite boulders sit on a slightly raised platform on the land of Torhouse, three miles west of Wigtown. They form a circle roughly 22 met…
Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumfries and Galloway
Carved into the living rock near the entrance to a small vitrified hillfort, a Pictish (of the Picts, the people of northern and eastern Scotland f…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Eleven stones stand in a rough ring on farmland between Holywood and Newbridge, a little north-west of Dumfries. Five are still earthfast; the rest…
Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumfries and Galloway
Three ditches and two ramparts, some of them cut directly into the rock, guard the only gentle approach to Tynron Doon. On its other three sides th…
Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumfries and Galloway
Wallace's House is an earthen rampart (an encircling bank built for defence) raised on a promontory near Lochmaben in Dumfries and Galloway. The de…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
A large glacial erratic sits in a field in the parish of Glasserton, in what was historically Wigtownshire, and gives its name to the whole monumen…
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
Minor monument · Medieval
Dumfries and Galloway
Thornhill’s 1714 Pegasus-topped cross was planned with the village road, making its column a surviving civic centre despite relocation and later re…
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
The site carries two widely separated chapters of the human past. Aspects of Barsalloch Fort are thought to date to the Mesolithic period, placing…
Fortified place · Roman
Dumfries and Galloway
More inscribed and sculptured Roman stones have been recovered from Birrens than from any other site in Scotland, and it is this dense scatter of a…
Fortified place · Roman
Dumfries and Galloway
A swathe of hundreds of lead sling bullets lies scattered along the south-eastern flank of Burnswark Hill, marking the line where Roman slingers on…
Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumfries and Galloway
The facing stones of the wall have almost entirely gone, but the heat that once fused the rampart (an encircling bank built for defence) still show…
Settlement · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Dorman's Island is a crannog (a dwelling built on an artificial island in a loch) in Whitefield Loch, in the parish of Old Luce in the Machars peni…
Sacred place · Prehistoric
Dumfries and Galloway
Nine stones lie fallen in an oval on high ground north-east of Lockerbie, none of them still standing. The setting, known as Whitcastles or Little…
No places match those filters.
