The beautiful and lonely wilds of the Glenkens

This has long been a forgotten part of Scotland and is therefore relatively unspoiled with a wide variety of fantastic wildlife and spectacular landscape ranging from the mountains and moorland; woodland and forest; burns, rivers, to lochs and farmland.

The Glenkens is the wildest and largest glen in Galloway; as the name implies, it is the Valley of the Ken.

‘mountains wild beyond imagination so that scarce any thing in the Alps exceeds them’

(From "A Journie to Galloway in 1721" by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik)

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The rivers Ken and Deugh rise in the hills, the Deugh on the west side of Cairsmore of Carsphairn and the Ken on the eastern slopes of Windy Standard. (The River Nith rises from southern slopes of Blacklorg Hill to the northeast of Cairnsmore of Carsphairn.).

The Ken and Deugh meet at Kendoon and flow, as the River Ken, into Loch Ken.

The Dee, known before it joins the Ken as the Black Water of Dee, flows from its source in Loch Dee to the west, firstly to Clatteringshaws Loch, and then in to Loch Ken, where it joins the Water of Ken just north of Parton.

From there, known as the Dee, it flows 15 miles southwards to Kirkcudbright, and into Kirkcudbright Bay to reach the Solway, a distance of just over 38 miles.

Loch Ken and River Dee Marshes were designated Ramsar sites on August 21, 1992.

The Glenkens is situated to the north the county of Kirkcudbrightshire and to the south of the Ayrshire border. Originally, including the parishes of Dalry, Kells, Balmaclellan, Carsphairn and sometimes Parton, other villages along the upper part of the Ken-Dee are here included.

The upper part of the Glenkens is described as a wide V-shaped valley surrounded by hills and moorland, the lower part as V-shaped with a narrow valley floor. The landscape was shaped by glaciers with rocky ridges, eroded sloped and glacial deposits, in the shape of ‘drumlins’ are evident in the lower areas. Much of the geology of the area is Ordovician and Silurian rocks that were once sea-floor sands and mud, deposited about 450 million years ago. Although there has always been a loch, it was enlarged when the Hydro Scheme was built in the 1930s.