swimming pool self catering scotland

Fine Georgian Cottage - sleeps 6+1

self catering Scotland in walled garden with swimming pool

I am sitting in a deck chair, my bare feet sinking into the dewy grass blanket beneath me; the weather yesterday was wet but now the sun is out and the heat is burning my shoulders. My wife Lesley is similarly seated and we are sharing a bottle of claret while reading the books we picked up in Wigtown before lunch - mine is a mint volume of Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture published in 1880 which has the most exquisite plates of Ruskin’s sketches and Lesley’s is a volume of Trollop that she found in a shop called Readinglasses. The garden is heaving with sound - the buzzing of myriad insects punctuated with bird song and the excited shrieks of our children playing in the swimming pool in front of us. To the rear sits Pavilion Cottage with its distinctive warm brick facade punctuated by the white pavilion dining room that gives the cottage its name. All of this is set within the high screen of a Victorian walled garden which makes it very private, very secret - like the midnight garden it feels too good to be here all of the time - surely it must vanish and be part of a lost dream.

So what can you see and do around this lovely cottage ?

Supposing for one moment that you want to venture away from the cottage and garden, you could walk 5 minutes to Rigg Bay, a deserted, idyllic and private sandy beach and spend an afternoon building sand castles and guddling in rock pools. Or visit Wigtown, Scotland's National Book Town, with its main street full of bookshops and cafes. You could visit Whithorn which is the birth place of Christianity in mainland Scotland, where there are archaeological digs in progress. You could walk one of the many coastal walks that can take you to the place where two women were tied to posts in the tidal slip so that they were drowned as the tide came in, martyred in the name of Christianity! You could venture northward to take a trip around Scotland's most southern distillery, or fish for trout and salmon in the river Bladnoch. You could take your bikes to Kirroughtree to try out one of the 7Stanes, a group of 7 mountain bike routes for all abilities that make this area a magnet to mountain bikers from all over Europe. You could venture eastwards and visit Cream 'o' Galloway, one of Scotland’s best ice cream makers and have a play in their adult sized adventure playground. Or you could try out horse riding across the sandy shore of the Solway Coast.

But all of this would suppose that you wanted to leave Pavilion Cottage and its enchanted garden. Not me - I'll just carry on reading the Seven Lamps of Architecture some more!