On the Trail of The Five Red Herrings

During my recent trip to Scotland, I was keen to trace some of the locations which crop up in Dorothy L. Sayers' 1931 novel, The Five Red Herrings. Set in Galloway, this book is a love letter to the area and the prefatory note (addressed to Joe Dignam, landlord of the Anwoth Hotel in Gatehouse in Fleet, to whom the book is dedicated) spells out her commitment to writing about real places. 

The main focus of my pilgrimage was Kirkcudbright. As Sayers says in the book, in this part of the world one either fishes or paints, and painting is at the heart of the novel. What I found very interesting is that Kirkcudbright was a mecca for artists long before Sayers and her husband Mac Fleming (an Orcadian who loved painting) arrived there on holiday. And that tradition continues. In the twenty-first century, when you drive in, there is a sign which proclaims the fact that you are entering an 'Artists' Town'.

Galleries abound, and I enjoyed looking at the exhibition devoted to the portrait painter Sir Henry Raeburn at Kirkcudbright Galleries, an impressive space which has plenty of other interesting material on permanent display. There's another nice little gallery at the Harbour Cottage, while it was fun to walk down High Street and pass the door of the No. 14a, which Mac Fleming rented for ten years up to the start of the Second World War. A stone's throw away is Broughton House, once owned by the artist E.A. Hornel and now in the care of the National Trust of Scotland. The house featured in the 1975 TV version of Five Red Herrings, as did a number of other places in the town.

From Kirkcudbright, it's not far to Gatehouse of Fleet, where Dorothy and Mac stayed at the Anwoth Hotel, now called The Ship Inn (below). This is another attractive town which benefits from a waterside setting and as I wandered around the area, it was good to picture Sayers roaming about, in search of inspirations for her story. She found plenty of good material, that's for sure.