It’s a hard living high in the hills between Dalry and Moniaive, where winters are long and spring arrives late.
And pulling up outside Fingland there’s a distinct chill in the air – even although its early summer.
It’s a beautiful setting for a working farm with the Rhinns of Kells framing the sunset behind the whitewashed farmhouse.
The narrow road leading here from Dalry is long – and there’s a distinct outpost feel around this remote oasis of human life in the wild borderlands where northern Kirkcudbrightshire meets Dumfriesshire.
I’m greeted by Jimmy Wallace and wife Margaret, who invite me inside where it’s warm and cosy from heat off the range.
Fingland, Jimmy tells me, has been with the Wallace family for four generations, an unbroken thread of occupancy stretching back to 1905.
Fully 1,000 feet above sea level, the farm lies midway between Dalry and Moniaive, each seven miles distant down a single track road.
“We’re in Kirkcudbrightshire – but there’s actually three or four acres of Fingland in the old county of Dumfriesshire,” Jimmy smiles. “We are right on the border.
“Margaret went to Moniaive school and her dad Bob was a shepherd down the road at Knockaughley farm.
“From the top of Fingland you can freewheel down to where Margaret came from, just about to her house three miles away.”
Jimmy relates how his great-grandfather John Wallace came to Fingland from Ballinnie down the Moniaive road.
“I was told my great-grandpa and the factor fell out over a £5 increase in the rent and he came to Fingland, still on Earlstoun Estate.
“His son William Wallace came in and then my dad, who was William Wallace also.”
How does Jimmy feel that his family has been bound up with these acres high above the Glenkens, for well over a century?
“We are the fourth generation at Fingland,” he says simply. “It’s an honour to live in this place.
“People come up say how can you stay out here? I just tell them nae bother, boy.”
Over a coffee and Margaret’s home baking, Jimmy leaves you in no doubt that rural depopulation and the disappearance of families from neighbouring holdings has, in his view, been calamitous.
He feels the loss of an old way of life keenly, all the more so because Fingland is – so far – one of the few hill farms to avoid being smothered by commercial forestry.
“In my youth Fingland was surrounded by five farming families – now there are none,” he says.
“There were the McCubbins at Auchenshinnoch, Cuthbertsons at Glenshimmeroch, Jardines at Trostan, Jim Little at Auchenstroan and the Thomsons at Carroch and Blackmark.
“They have all been planted with trees.
“The population, the working families, the people who look after the sheep are gone – that’s the part that affects me most.
“Within four miles of Fingland as the crow flies there have been 20 hill farms planted up in my lifetime, forbye an odd field or two.
“In that whole area only nine remain – and of those two more are under threat.
“And that’s just the top of the Glenkens.
“When they were wee my auntie Mary and uncle Alan walked three miles from Fingland to Stronefreggan School every day.
“They would meet the kids from Trostan and Knocksting on the way at a wee meeting cairn they built themselves.
“The school is just a dwelling now but Stronefreggan bowling hall is still there.”
The hall, close to the high Carsphairn road, was once a busy meeting place for dozens of families living in the north part of Dalry parish.
“I was secretary of the bowling club,” Jimmy tells me.
“The gents would play on Monday nights while Tuesday nights were for the ladies.
“Between the two there would be 50 members – that tells you how many folk stayed on all the farms round about.
“I started Dalry school in 1965 so within 55 years it’s gone from dozens of weans to virtually none.
“When the Dalry school bus came round it did a loop, turning right at near Carsphairn along the Water of Ken to Stronefreggan, then right again past Fingland and back down to Dalry.
“By the time it got back down the glen it was standing room only – there were eight weans at Mackilston alone.
“Now even Carsphairn School is closed.”
Jimmy and Margaret have three children, Kirsten, 24, Emily, 22, and 20-year-old James.
Accumulating three weans in four years is pretty good going by any yardstick – and positively lightning fast compared with how long it took Jimmy to get round to asking Margaret to be his wife.
“We met about Moniaive,” he recalls with a twinkle in his eye.
“We would go out to the Lochinvar in Dalry or The George in Moniaive.
“We went together for ten years before we were married.
“I just wanted to make sure I had the right woman – and there’s no doubt about that now.
“We got engaged in 1993 and were married at Glencairn Church in 1994.
“Margaret’s been tremendous – she has to be a special person to stay away out here.”
What about the succession, I wonder - a key question for a tenant farmer.
“It’s looking the now like Kirsten is perhaps going to take it on,” Jimmy says.
“She’s looking the most likely.”
“The family has been here 117 years and counting – and that’s a long time.
“I would like to think that it will stay in the family if that’s going to be allowed, or if it’s going to be viable.
“But I do fear we are going to be priced out of farming up in the hills.
“The fat cats are getting paid big money by these forestry planting grants,
“That’s the bit that sticks in my throat.
“It’s all wrong – they are not feeding the country.
“During the war they planted three of four acres of the best hill ground at Blackpark to grow corn (oats).
“Now that farm has been sold to grow trees.
“Now you can just about walk from Moniaive to Dalry and never be off trees.
“Glenshimmeroch was maybe the best farm in the Glenkens.”
Talking to Jimmy it seems things have come full circle.
Decades ago self-sufficiency and low environmental impact farming were the norm, and now they are returning to favour – too late, perhaps, for agriculture in the hills.
“My dad Willie used to grow a quarter of an acre of tatties on a field up here,” Jimmy says ruefully.
“He fed the pigs with them and killed two every year himself, butchered them, cured the bacon and hung the hams up on hooks in the back room to dry cure.
“He grew corn as well and fed the sheafs to the Galloways.
“He employed a shepherd as well – but we’re just ourselves now.
“I was one of four children – my brother William went to farm at Clonhie at Penpont but had a disagreement with the estate and emigrated to New Zealand in 1994.
“But I never left home – I was brought up here and the place is part of me.
“My heart is certainly in Fingland.
“I have looked at the Rhinns of Kells range all my life and recently walked along the range from Garryhorn Farm to Clenrie. I hardly saw a sheep on the entire way.”
The decline of farming in the northern Glenkens has impacted others aspects of local life, notably the annual Carsphairn Show, of which Jimmy is a former president.
“It meant a lot to me – I started going when I was ten or eleven and I don’t think I have missed a show since,” he says.
“I do worry for the show today with the people not being there and the sheep not being there.
“Carsphairn was a major event – at one time it had nothing but Blackface sheep.
“Folk came from miles around, as far as Gatehouse and south Ayrshire.
“The confined section was well worth the winning – now you’d be lucky to get three or four farms to show in the confined.
“My worry is that people get out of the way of going to the show.
“It used to be the first gathering for the shepherds after the
lambing finished.
“All the old boys would go to Carsphairn but these older boys are gone as are the farms.
“There was a big hotel in Carsphairn called the Salutation.
“We had some good nights in there and there was a dance after the show in the Lagwyne Hall.”
Jimmy, 61, currently runs 50 mainly Galloway cows and 600 Blackface ewes, a figure somewhat reduced after 350 acres of rough grazing he was renting nearby was ploughed up for forestry.
Fingland has become renowned for top quality Galloway cattle – in 2008 Jimmy won the championship at the Galloway sales at Castle Douglas with his bull, Ronaldo.
Fingland topped the sale again in 2010 with Obama, which sold for 10,500 guineas, and again in 2013 with his full brother Coldplay, which sold for 11,000 guineas.
Hardy Galloway cattle, easily wintered and able to forage on rough hill pasture, it seems, are back in vogue for environmental and
financial reasons – and this year’s February sale of Galloways was a
huge success for the Wallace
family.
“We had six heifers there – the top was £8,000 and the six averaged £5,000,” Jimmy says.
“It was a tremendous sale, I was highly delighted that day.
“In my eyes they were true hill Galloways, traditional brown cows bred on the hill.
“I think the native breeds are coming back.”
Jimmy’s grandfather William, I also learn, was an outstanding shepherd with a great gift for handling working collies, his prowess leading to huge success at sheepdog trials.
Best dog of them all was Loos II, who with William was the best partnership in Scotland in the late 1920s.
“My grandpa got her from a man who could not do anything with her,” Jimmy tells me.
“But he made her into a tremendous animal – she was a super trial dog a super breeder as well.
“You have to win a cup three times to win it outright and he won the New Cumnock Collie Dog Challenge Cup three times in 1926, 1927 and 1928.
“We own that cup now thanks to my grandfather, who judged a lot of trials as well.
“Over the years JM Wilson, the champion shepherd from Innerleithen in the Borders, took four of Loos’ pups which went on to become international champions at trials.”
Meanwhile, Jimmy carries on – year in, year out, in good weather and bad.
“With Fingland being 1,000 feet above sea level we are later in getting going,” he says.
“It’s isolated too with the number of farms planted round about it.
“I sometimes feel that the forest is closing in round about me, which I’m dead against.
“The trees also bring vermin – ravens, foxes and crows
“Foxes take the lambs and the ravens and crows peck out the lambs’ tongues just as they’re being born.
“When the head and feet are out of the ewe the raven comes along and takes the tongue clean away.
“When that happens the lamb can’t grip the teat and sook wi’ its tongue to get milk, so they die.”
Winters can be harsh up here, Jimmy tells me, with a late spring blizzard of 40 years ago etched into his memory.
“Aye, 1981 was the worst.
“It was April 21 and the snow came bad.
“We lost a lot of lambs – they got buried and couldnae stand it.
“My brother-in-law and sister were visiting and in the morning the snow had covered their Mini.
“It was a hell of a storm.
“I went out in the morning and could not see the lambs because the show had covered them.
“We lost 40 or 50 nae bother – I don’t like Fingland when it’s like that.”
