Kirkcudbright

Like many other remote areas during the Second World War, a 4,700-acre (19 km²) area to the southeast of the town and extending to the coast of the Solway Firth, was acquired by the Army in 1942, as a training area for the D-Day invasion.[24][25] The area remains in active use for live-firing exercises. Part of the training area is the Dundrennan Range, a weapons development and testing range. The use of this range for the testing of depleted uranium shells has been controversial.[26][27] The range also contains a surviving A39 Tortoise heavy assault tank.[28]

Broughton House is an 18th-century town house standing on the High Street. It was the home of Scots impressionist artist Edward Atkinson Hornel between 1901 and his death in 1933. The National Trust for Scotland maintain the house and its contents as a museum of Hornel's life and work.[29]

The Stewartry Museum was founded in 1879 and was at first based in the Town Hall until it became too small to house the collections.[30][31] The collection moved to a purpose-built site. It contains the local and natural history of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Britain's earliest surviving sporting trophy, the Siller Gun, is part of the collection.[32]

The Tolbooth building is now used as an arts centre.[33][34][35]

Kirkcudbright has for long been a centre for visual artists and is now known as "the Artists' Town".[36] The main routes into the town include brown tourist signs saying "Artists' Town".[37]

Kirkcudbright is home to an artists' collective which has a shop in the town centre, The PA, Professional Artists Collective.[38] Wasps (Workshop & Artists Studio Provision Scotland) occupy two linked townhouses, Canonwalls and Claverhouse, in the High Street.[39] It is also a centre in which many artists open their studios during Spring Fling Open Studios.[40]

The Kirkcudbright Arts & Crafts Trail takes place every summer. This four-day event, finishing on the first Monday in August, allows visitors to see artists' studios and visit places that are normally off-limits to visitors.[41]

Galleries in Kirkcudbright include Kirkcudbright Galleries, in the former Town Hall, in St Mary Street. There is also The Harbour Cottage Gallery.[42]

Kirkcudbright Harbour

1994 wooden sculpture In Memory of Loved Ones Lost at Sea by Charlie Easterfield in Kirkcudbright harbour

The 1907 novel Little Esson by S.R.Crockett is a romantic mystery involving the artistic community of Kirkcudbright.[43] The title character Archibald Esson is a fictionalised version of William Stewart MacGeorge, Crockett's boyhood friend. The later whodunit Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers also involves the artistic community of Kirkcudbright.[44] In 1975, the book was made into a BBC TV film shot in the town, with Ian Carmichael playing the lead role of Lord Peter Wimsey.[45]

The town also provided locations for the cult 1973 horror film The Wicker Man.[46]

Robert Urquhart starred in a 1980 BBC adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, shot on location in Kirkcudbright.[47]

Matt McGinn wrote and recorded "The Wee Kirkcudbright Centipede" which has also been covered by other singers including Alistair McDonald on disc and on his BBC Scotland show Songs of Scotland, which included a segment filmed on location at the town's Johnston Primary School where McDonald led the children in a dance sequence.[48][49][50]

Jessie M. King's house, Greengate

Kirkcudbright has had a long association with the Glasgow art movement. Several artists, including the Glasgow Boys and the famed Scottish Colourists, such as Samuel Peploe and Francis Cadell, based themselves in the area over a 30-year period from 1880 to 1910, establishing the Kirkcudbright Artists' Colony. Also among those who moved here from Glasgow were Edward Hornel, George Henry and Jessie M. King. Later another small group of Glasgow-trained artists built their studios across the river at The Stell, including John Charles Lamont and Robert Sivell. Landscape painter Charles Oppenheimer moved to Kirkcudbright in 1908. He is given credit along with artist Dorothy Nesbitt for protecting the Harbour Cottage (art) Gallery from demolition in 1956. Kirkcudbright became known as "the artists' town".[36] Other artists include:

• Joseph Simpson (1879–1939) British painter and etcher of portraits and sporting subjects.[51]
• Phyllis Bone RSA (15 February 1894 – 12 July 1972) was a 20th-century Scottish sculptor. She moved to Galloway and lived in later life in Kirkcudbright.[52]
• William Hanna Clarke, a landscape and figure painter who lived in Kirkcudbright, and many of his works featured the town. He is buried in the town's churchyard and his tombstone was carved by his friend Alexander Proudfoot, a Glasgow sculptor.[53]

• Bob McDougall, George Cloy and David Mathieson are professional footballers who lived in the town.[54][55][56]
• David MacMyn, Scottish rugby international, was from Kirkcudbright.[57]

Lawrence of Arabia's family lived at Craigville, St Mary's Street, Kirkcudbright between 1889 and 1891

• Malcolm Caldwell, born James Alexander Malcolm Caldwell (1931-1978) was a British academic and a prolific Marxist writer. Caldwell was murdered, under mysterious circumstances, a few hours after meeting Pol Pot in Cambodia. His father, Archibald Thomson Caldwell was County Architect for Kirkcudbrightshire from 1950 until his death in 1957. Caldwell was Dux of Kirkcudbright Academy in 1949.[58]
• Cecil Coles (1888 – 1918), a composer who was born in Kirkcudbright and killed on active service in the First World War.[59]
• Marriott Edgar, the lyricist and poet who wrote, amongst other things, Albert and the Lion for Stanley Holloway, was born in Kirkcudbright in 1880.[60]
• John Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine of Rerrick, banker and Governor of Northern Ireland[61]
• T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), lived in infancy with his family between 1889 and 1891 in Craigville, St Mary's Street. His brother William George was born here in 1889.[62]
• Gary Lewis actor, Gangs of New York, Billy Elliot, etc. lives in Kirkcudbright.[63]

The first stage from Glasgow of the Tour of Britain 2019 ended in Kirkcudbright on 7 September.[65] The winner was Dutchman Dylan Groenewegen.[66]