Dorman's Island, Whitefield Loch

The country around Old Luce was settled long before the crannog was raised. Around 2500 BC, in Neolithic and Bronze Age times, communities at nearby Dunragit built a ceremonial monument of three massive concentric timber circles, the outermost some 300 metres across, almost six times the size of Stonehenge. It served as a ceremonial centre and meeting place for the early farming communities of south-west Scotland, and marks the deep antiquity of human activity in this corner of Wigtownshire.

Against that background the crannog on Dorman's Island was constructed around 250 BC, in the Iron Age. Building an artificial island in the shallows of Whitefield Loch required moving timber, brushwood and stone into open water to raise a stable platform, a considerable undertaking that set the dwelling apart from the ordinary settlements of the dry land around it.

Dorman's Island did not stand alone. Whitefield Loch holds a second crannog, Tree Island, and the two together speak of a landscape in which living on the water was an established habit. The connection reached beyond the loch itself: the fortified village on the Knock of Luce, on the highest hill in the parish, was thought to have been raised by the same people who built the extensive lake dwellings in Machermore Loch about two miles to the west.

By the Middle Ages the wider district had passed to the MacDowall Clan, whose ancient castle stood at Machermore near Whitefield. The crannogs, by then long abandoned, lay within a landscape that continued to be fought over and held by the great families of Galloway. In more recent times the loch itself has changed. Its water level has fallen, and the retreat of the water left Tree Island crannog stranded on dry land, while Dorman's Island remains surrounded by water, a visible reminder of how the shoreline once stood.