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Annan

The picturesque old Royal Burgh of Annan, even though it is a mile from the coast, was once a thriving seaport, and had a boat-building yard. Even today there is a small, silted up quay on the River Annan. The Burns Cairn stands nearby commemorating the fact that Robert Burns visited here as an excise man.

The predominant stone in the town is red sandstone, epitomised by the handsome Town Hall of 1878, which dominates the High Street.

 Hugh Clapperton the explorer was born in the town in 1788. At the age of 13 he became a cabin boy on a ship sailing between Liverpool and North America, and later went to the Mediterranean after being press ganged into the Royal Navy. He died in Nigeria in 1827 while searching for the source of the Niger. His notebooks and diaries have been published under the name Difficult and Dangerous Roads. . In Bank Street is the Historic Resources Centre, a small museum that puts on a programme of displays and exhibitions.

South of the town, at one time, was the Solway Viaduct, a railway bridge that connected Dumfriesshire to Cumbria across the Solway Firth. It was opened for passenger trains in 1870, and at the time was the longest railway bridge across water in Britain. In 1881 parts of the bridge were damaged when great ice flows smashed into its stanchions. The then keeper of the bridge, John Welch, plus two colleagues, remained in their cabin on the bridge as the lumps of ice, some as big as 27 yards square, careered into the bridges’ supports. At 3.30 in the morning, when disaster seemed imminent, they were ordered to leave. Two lengths of the bridge, one 50 feet long, and one 300 feet long, collapsed into the firth, and 37 girders and 45 pillars were smashed beyond repair. However, unlike the Tay Bridge disaster, there was no loss of life. Finally, in 1934, the bridge was dismantled, and all that is left to see nowadays are the approaches on both shores, and a stump in the middle of the water.

Haaf Net Fishing is a means of catching fish that stretches back to Viking times, and it is still carried out at the mouth of the River Annan from April to August each year. The fishermen stand chest deep in the water wielding large haaf nets, which are attached to long wooden frames. In 1538 James V granted the haaf net fishermen of Annan a royal charter. In 1992 the rights of the fishermen were challenged in court by the owners of a time-share development further up the river, but the judge decided that the charter still held good today.