Torthorwald is a village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...

Dumfries and Galloway Dumfries and Galloway (; ) is one of the 32 unitary council areas of Scotland, located in the western part of the Southern Uplands. It is bordered by East Ayrshire, South Ayrshire, and South Lanarkshire to the north; Scottish Borders to the no ...

, south-west Scotland. It is located east of

Dumfries Dumfries ( ; ; from ) is a market town and former royal burgh in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, near the mouth of the River Nith on the Solway Firth, from the Anglo-Scottish border. Dumfries is the county town of the Counties of Scotland, ...

on the A709 road to

Lochmaben Lochmaben () is a small town and civil parish in Scotland, and site of a castle. It lies west of Lockerbie, in Dumfries and Galloway. By the 12th century the Bruce family had become the local landowners and, in the 14th century, Edward I of Engl ...

. The area was the property of the de Torthorwald family until the end of the 13th century, when the estate passed by marriage to the Kirkpatricks. In 1418, William de Carleil married the Kirkpatrick heiress. He may have been the builder of Torthorwald Castle, which was erected around this time, possibly on top of an earlier a

motte A motte-and-bailey castle is a European fortification with a wooden or stone keep situated on a raised area of ground called a motte, accompanied by a walled courtyard, or Bailey (castle), bailey, surrounded by a protective Rampart (fortificati ...

. Torthorwald was erected as a

burgh of barony A burgh of barony was a type of Scottish town (burgh). Burghs of barony were distinct from royal burghs, as the title was granted to a landowner who, as a tenant-in-chief, held his estates directly from the crown. (In some cases, they might also ...

in 1473. Torthorwald Castle was occupied until 1715; only two of its walls still stand, to a height of around . The pre-Reformation church at Torthorwald belonged to the Trinitarian Friars of Fail in Ayrshire. The present parish church was erected in 1782 on the site of this earlier foundation. Torthorwald is now within the united Parish of Kirkmichael, Tinwald and Torthorwald, which was created in 1981. The 19th-century missionary John Gibson Paton (1824–1907) grew up in Torthorwald. His evangelical work in the

New Hebrides New Hebrides, officially the New Hebrides Condominium () and named after the Hebrides in Scotland, was the colonial name for the island group in the South Pacific Ocean that is now Vanuatu. Native people had inhabited the islands for three th ...

is commemorated in the church gate piers. Another building of interest is a 19th-century

cruck A cruck or crook frame is a curved timber, one of a pair, which support the roof of a building, historically used in England and Wales. This type of timber framing consists of long, generally naturally curved, timber members that lean inwards and ...

-framed and

thatched Thatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, water reed, sedge ('' Cladium mariscus''), rushes, heather, or palm branches, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away from the inner roof. Since the bulk of ...

cottage. Restored in the 1990s, the cottage is protected as a category A

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

, and is maintained by a local heritage association. The village has a hotel, a village hall, and formerly had a primary school which closed in 2010. An annual Scarecrow Fun Day involves villagers erecting scarecrows in their front gardens.

Transport

There is a frequent bus service to

which takes about 15 minutes. The village was also previously served by the nearby Racks railway station which closed in 1965.

References

CANMORE : http://www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/search_item/index.php?service=NAS&id=RHP3356 {{authority control Villages in Dumfries and Galloway Dumfriesshire Parishes in Dumfries and Galloway