Travel: Kirkcudbright

The Glasgow Girls is the latest artistic coup for the fishing port which markets itself as the "Artists' Town", but there's nothing new about the brand, as David Devereux, museums curator for the Stewartry, points out: "By 1900, the Glasgow and South Western Railway was advertising weekend breaks in 'the artists' town'."

By the early 20th century, the east Galloway town was an established artists' colony, with the successful painter Edward A Hornel, illustrator Jessie M King and her husband, painter and critic EA Taylor, as leading lights. Other residents or frequent visitors included Glasgow Boys - and Girls. Robert Burns, head of drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, declared that no young artist's training was complete without a sojourn at the Taylors' home.

Today, the area's artistic community bursts with creative output, as this weekend's Kirkcudbright Arts & Crafts Trail shows. The trail, open today and tomorrow, accesses the homes and studios of some 130 participants.

Wandering around the 18th and 19th-century streets with their beckoning closes, swifts coursing the roofscapes (captured on many a canvas), you feel nothing much has changed. In the High Street, Hornel's home, Broughton House, a mid-18th century building to which the artist added a studio and an imposing gallery - complete with a copy of the Parthenon frieze - is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, along with a garden evoking the luxuriant floral settings of the artist's stock-in-trade apple-cheeked lassies and Japanese maidens.

Further along the High Street is the Greengate, now a B&B but once home to Jessie M King, the "Glasgow Girl" whose whimsical pen work saw her in demand as a book illustrator. A regular visitor was crime writer Dorothy L Sayers, who opened her murder mystery Five Red Herrings with the line, "If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints."

Unsurprisingly, the town is not short on galleries, from private enterprises such as the High Street Gallery or the harbourside Scottish Showcase to the Tolbooth Arts Centre, established in one of the town's oldest buildings. Even the war memorial, under the looming battlements of MacLellan's Castle, is striking, its muscular, naked warrior and child the work of sculptor George Henry Paulin.

Devereux's own realm is the Stewartry Museum, its motley collections including the much-prized "Siller Gun", a miniature silver hackbutt, dated 1587, and Britain's earliest surviving sporting trophy. The museum currently features a retrospective on local painter William Hannah Clarkeby.

It may be art which draws visitors to this often bypassed south-west corner of Scotland, but once there, there is much else to enjoy, including a jazz festival and a programme of summer events including Scottish music nights at Harbour Square, ending with a Tattoo on 30 August.

Nearby are Threave house and gardens, while a short drive through the hummocky scenery which inspired George Hendry's famous Galloway Landscape is Kippford and the Colvend Coast, as rocky and lushly wooded as Wester Ross. "The qualities the artists enjoyed are still here," says Devereux, "the light, the pace of life, the landscape and townscape ..."

Jessie M King converted properties into studios for other artists. With Wasps, the charity providing affordable studio space, about to open premises in that same High Street, who knows what new Kirkcudbright Boys - or Girls - may emerge in the future?

For information on Kirkcudbright and accommodation offers, see www.visitscotland.com/perfect, tel: 0845 2255 121. The Glasgow Girls, Kirkcudbright Town Hall until 30 August.

This article was first published in the Scotsman, July 31, 2010