Castle Douglas
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Most folk come to CASTLE DOUGLAS (www.castledouglas.net), eighteen miles southwest of Dumfries, simply in order to visit the nearby attractions of Threave Garden and Castle. The man responsible for the town's late eighteenth-century grid-plan streets (and its name) is William Douglas, a local lad who made a fortune trading in the West Indies. Douglas had ambitious plans to turn his town into a prosperous industrial and commercial centre, but, like his scheme to create an extensive Galloway canal system, it didn't quite work. Still, thanks to Douglas, the town now has a distinctive, dead straight main street, King Street, that slopes down past the landmark clocktower, built in a mixture of red sandstone and grey granite that's typical of the town.
Threave Garden (daily 9.30am to sunset; NTS; £4.50) is a pleasant mile or so's walk or cycle south of Castle Douglas, along the shores of Loch Carlingwark. The garden features a magnificent spread of flowers and woodland, sixty acres subdivided into more than a dozen areas, from the bright, old-fashioned blooms of the Rose Garden to the brilliant banks of rhododendrons in the Woodland Garden and the ranks of primula, astilbe and gentian in the Peat Garden. In springtime, thousands of visitors turn up for the flowering of more than two hundred types of daffodil and, from late May onwards, the herbaceous beds are the main attraction, with most of them arranged like islets in a sea of lawn (so that they can be viewed from all sides). The exception is the more formal beds of the Walled Garden which adjoin the greenhouses and the nursery.
The nicest way of reaching Threave Castle (April-Sept daily 9.30am-6.30pm; HS; £2), a mile or so north of the gardens, is to walk through the estate. However you decide to get there, you should follow the signs to the Open Farm, from where it's a lovely fifteen-minute walk down to the River Dee, where you ring a brass bell for the boat to take you over to the flat and grassy island on which the stern-looking tower house stands. Built for one of the Black Douglases, Archibald the Grim, in around 1370, the fortress was among the first of its kind, a sturdy, rectangular structure completed shortly after the War of Independence when clan feuding spurred a frenzy of castlebuilding. The rickety curtain wall to the south and east is all that remains of the artillery fortifications, hurriedly constructed in the 1450s in a desperate - and unsuccessful - attempt to defend the castle against James II's new-fangled cannon. The Covenanters wrecked the place in 1640 after a thirteen-week siege, but enough remains of the interior to make it worth exploring.
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