Description
This tour looks at some of Dumfries and Galloway’s heroes and heroines and looks at the impact they had both locally, nationally and in some cases internationally. The tour wil start by exploring the life of Rev Henry Duncan. We will then visit Ruthwell where Henry Duncan was a Scottish minister, geologist and social reformer. The minister of Ruthwell parish church in Dumfriesshire, he founded the world’s first commercial savings bank. He was also an author, publisher and philanthropist. We will visit the Savings Bank Museum in Ruthwell and then go to the local church to visit the world renowned Ruthwell Cross which a wonderful stone Anglo-Saxon cross dating from the 8th century. We will then travel into Dumfries to have a look at Moat Brae, where JM Barrie played as a child and was the inspiration for Peter Pan and Neverland. After lunch in Dumfries we will visit Robert Burns’ house and museum. We will then go to Drumlanrig Castle to visit where Kirkpatrick MacMillan designed the first bicycle. We will then visit Dunscore to see the plaque commemorating the life of Jane Haining who was a Church of Scotland missionary. She worked in Budapest, where she was arrested by the Nazis in 1944. She died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz later that year. Our last visit will be to Irongray Church to visit the gravestone of Jane Haining and to hear the incredible story of Helen Walker who Sir Walter Scott based the character Jeanie Deans on in his novel The Heart of Midlothian, In the novel, Jeanie Deans walks to London in 1738 to secure a reprieve for her young sister, convicted of murdering her new-born child. The ‘sister’, Isobel Walker, definitely existed and almost certainly did kill her child in Cluden, Dumfriesshire, in 1736. At the end of the tour we will return to your chosen location.
