Historically, Galloway was a much older region of southwestern Scotland, with an identity that reached back centuries before today's county boundaries. Its heart lay west of Dumfries, stretching toward the Irish Sea.

My own ancestors were living in Dumfriesshire and Annandale, along the eastern edge of this Galloway world. People crossed these landscapes constantly. They married across parishes, crossed rivers, and carried stories. And this corner of Scotland gave those stories plenty to work with. To the south lay the Solway, with its dangerous tides and broad stretches of mud and sand. Inland were wooded glens and hills that could disappear into mist. Long before anyone called these stories “folklore,” generations of people were already living among them.

They belonged to a cadet branch of the powerful Johnstones of Annandale, a family whose influence stretched across Dumfriesshire for centuries. Corheid itself lay only a short distance from Breconside and formed part of a network of Johnstone properties that included Lochhouse and neighboring estates.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, James Johnstone the younger of Corheid had married Janet Douglas, linking the Border Johnstones with one of Scotland's most distinguished noble families. Their children inherited far more than land.

They inherited a world shaped by clan loyalty, legal tradition, and generations of service to the Scottish Crown.