She lives in a house dating back more than 500 years, whose thick stone walls and narrow passageways are testament to its antiquity.
And Mary Armstrong is keenly aware of the history of her home at the Clachan of Penninghame which, along with its surrounds, was once a significant ecclesiastical centre.
The ancient churchyard still exists but the old manse and pre-Reformation Bishop’s Palace – once a stopover for Scottish kings and queens on pilgrimages to St Ninian’s shrine at Whithorn – vanished long ago.
Mary has been on something of a crusade herself for much of her life, fighting to protect a traditional way of life in Galloway’s hills and high glens.
Born in 1946, Mary tells me even from an early age she had an almost spiritual connection to wild moors and hills and the Blackface sheep on them.
Perhaps for that reason, she dislikes the term hill farming for its “industrial connotations”, preferring instead “the shepherded hills” to describe farming life in the uplands.
The 75-year-old mother of three girls and grandmother of two comes over as a fiercely independent spirit, so it’s not entirely surprising to hear her own mother, Margaret Vance, was cut from the same stick.
“Before she married my father Graham, she had been a prisoner of war in Denmark,” Mary tells me.
“My mother was a gymnast and had gone out to the gymnastic institute at Silkeborg and was the only Scot there.
“When war was declared in 1939 she was interned at the famous Poulsen rose growing nursery at Kelleriis and could not get back home.
“The Nazis took over all the big houses on the east coast – and Kelleriis was one of them.
“But on the night of the wedding of one of the two Poulsen daughters my mother escaped.
“She was the only person not at the table for the meal because by that time she was being smuggled over to Sweden.
“From what I remember Red Cross ambulances took the prisoners north to the church in Elsinore, just across the water from Sweden.
“From there my mother and some others escaped across the Skaggerak in a fishing boat.
“For a while she taught English to the families she stayed with.
“Then she cycled up to the Arctic Circle and crossed over to Norway and got to Narvik.
“From the coast she managed to get back to Scotland – I have no idea how.
“I think that was in 1944.”
Mary’s story is borne out by historical fact – in October 1943 thousands of people, mostly Jewish Danes fleeing impending mass deportation to Germany, were ferried over to Sweden from Denmark in fishing boats.
It seems likely that Margaret Vance was among those refugees whose lives were saved by the brave Danish fisher folk.
The young Scot made it home safely and the bonds forged across the North Sea remained strong.
“I remember as a girl we had people from Denmark visit and I served them breakfast,” Mary recalls.
“My mother wanted to repay the hospitality she was shown during her whole time there.
“My daughter Justine’s middle name is Harriet, after Harriet Poulsen, of the rose growing family my mother met during the war.
“We went back every year on holiday to Kelleriis where the Poulsens still cultivate their roses.
“There’s a big interchange with Denmark because of our wartime connection.”
Tragically, Mary’s mother was killed in a car accident at Laggan near Gatehouse in 1966.
“She was coming back home from visiting my grandfather,” Mary says simply.
“After my mother died I can remember my father burning all her prisoner of war letters.
“Until my mother was killed you could not enter that cupboard – it was packed full of all this correspondence from Denmark.”
After attending Wigtown Primary School and the Douglas Ewart High School, Mary gained a B.Ed. teaching degree from Moray House in Edinburgh.
“I really wanted to be a vet,” she smiles.
“Anyway, I borrowed my uncle’s van to get me to Eddleston Primary School in the Borders for teaching practice but the van ended up in a bog.
“I had all my teaching stuff in a tea chest and I remember stepping out and trying to gather it all together.”
Mary, I discover, taught in several schools in the Machars from her early twenties and had three girls during her time at Baltersan Farm, south of Newton Stewart.
“I never stopped working with sheep,” she smiles.
“I have so many memories – up at Pultadie I remember brushing and preparing the lambs for a sale at Castle Douglas market.
“I worked all through the night to get them ready and the children fell asleep on fleeces.
“But there were no sheds at Pultadie and all the lambs got soaked.”
A member of the EIS, Mary joined Children’s International Summer Villages (CISV), which organises friendship exchange visits for students in member countries.
Now headquartered at Newcastle, the organisation aims “to educate and inspire action for a more just and peaceful world” – a philosophy with which Mary strongly agrees.
She made many friends through CISV, especially from Hamburg, and still keeps in touch with Dagmar, Henne and Rudiger Frisch and Anja Muller-Wieland.
“When the German students came over to Kirvennie my father taught them how to clip sheep,” she laughs,
“I have remained friends with them ever since.”
Even while teaching, Mary spent much of her spare time at Corriefeckloch, a remote farmstead in north-west Kirkcudbrightshire near the Ayrshire border, or Pultadie on the Wigtownshire moors between New Luce and Barhill.
The family business, Armstrong Brothers, Farmers and Stockbreeders, held the tenancies for both farms, the former with the Forestry Commission, the other with Stair Estates, Mary recalls.
“It was a long way in to Corriefeckloch from Glentrool and I remember as a little girl sitting in the boot of my uncle Roger’s car with all the collies and dangling my feet out the back.
“He was Roger Armstrong, who farmed at Barharrow near Gatehouse, and the herd at Corriefeckloch was a Mr Bell.
“I can still smell the peat fire in the grate and the burning of the heather in springtime.”
Mary recalls kepping the sheep – gathering them in off the hill and herding them into enclosures – was often a frantic affair with much whistling and shouting.
“The neighbourin’ was very important – people would just arrive from round about,” she smiles.
“Everybody mucked in to help whether you were a child or a grown up.
“Blackface tup lambs were always the worst.
“You had to get them in the pen but they always jumped.
“I remember getting a black eye from one because I was in the wrong position at the wrong time.”
Part of the appeal for Mary, it seems, is the communal way neighbours, family and local workers would help each other out at important times in the shepherding calendar, such as gathering in, clipping, dipping and lambing.
“I prefer to call it the shepherded hills rather than hill farming,” she says.
“That’s because of the social aspect – everybody is treated the same.
“You can’t be selfish – you have to cooperate and help each other out all the time.
“It was a very wholesome way of living.”
The landscape around Corriefeckloch was very different in the early 1950s, Mary recalls.
“There were no Sitka spruce at all then.
“And because there were no conifers you didn’t get so many midges.
“There were no trees, apart from hawthorn, blackthorn and rowan.
“I love working with sheep on the hill,” she says.
“Some people would call it an addiction – but to me I just became accustomed to it from an early age – it was a way of life.
“As I’m talking to you I can still smell the sheep and the heather burning.
“Up on the hill there’s a kind of spiritual freedom.
“I’m in my favourite place when I’m on the hill.”
It’s clear that Mary still feels passionately about her “shepherded hills” and the need to protect them.
She is still on the council of the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland – the country’s longest established independent environmental organisation – which works to protect Scotland’s landscape and the amenity of the countryside.
“It’s about protecting the landscape from any development like wind turbines and commercial forestry plantations,” she says.
“Current policy is all wrong.
“All the current Sitka planting has only come about because of the grants system.
“Then there’s the clear felling – look at the mess it leaves behind.
“The land should be put back to the way it was.
“Forestry destroys all the archaeological heritage, dykes and old dwellings.
“I remember going to a meeting in the late 1960’s at Gatehouse, before I was married,” she recalls.
“I said then that I wanted to protect the shepherded hills.
“That rural way of living and all the traditional ways are timeless.
“But it’s all disappeared because of forestry payments from the government.”
Mary also has scant regard for former conservation body Scottish Natural Heritage – or Scotland’s National Heresy as she describes it.
Its removal of hefted sheep – ewes which learn through generations to keep to the same hill ground – from Dromore Farm near Gatehouse, and the shepherding family from the farmhouse, still rankles.
“The hefted stock are important,” she says sadly.
“They know where the best vegetation is, how to react to weather conditions, where to go for shelter, to go to south facing slopes away from the north wind.
“When I go up there now it’s all derelict.
“Everything is becoming distanced from the people.”
Laggan of Dee on the Raiders’ Road forest drive is another place close to Mary’s heart.
“I used to go up there all the time and prepare supper each night for Peter Kelly and his son Ian,” she recalls.
“But now the house is lying empty.
“The forestry has demolished all the outbuildings so it could not be used as a farm again.
“Peter was chief ranger with them and kept deer at his home.
“I still have a little trough they used to water them.
“Appalled does not adequately describe how I feel about it all.”
Mary, I learn, also stayed for a time at Kirriemore, an isolated shepherd’s cottage on Merrick’s western approaches.
“I had no contract – I was an unpaid herd and did it for the love of it,” she says.
“There was nobody else in the house but I never felt lonely there.
“All I had for heat was a peat fire.
“A friend who worked for the Forestry Commission cut wood for me which was kept in the shed.”
A defining moment in Mary’s life came in 1996, when a bitter legal wrangle with her ex-husband saw her end up in jail for contempt of court for refusing to remove sheep from land which once belonged to her.
She hotly contested the court order and to this day resents the role of the judicial factor in taking away almost all she had.
Not entirely surprisingly, I learn that Mary took being locked up for 60 days at Cornton Vale then Dumfries in her stride.
“I was put in prison because I was keeping some sheep in the old graveyard at Clachan of Penninghame and land nearby,” she tells me openly.
“They maintained it and kept the grass down.
“I had lost everything else and they were very important to me.
“They had been brought from the Buchan at Glentrool.
“It was a very pleasant experience in prison,” she says.
“The head of Cornton Vale was concerned with woman’s rights.
“I read a lot and had a computer I used for typing out letters.
“I had a lot of inspiration there and wrote so much poetry, even some for the prisoners.
“When I was taken through all the different guard doors they used to bleat because they thought that would annoy me – but it didn’t.
“They knew I was in jail because of my association with sheep. It was a sort of kinship in a way.”
“They stopped to let me drink the water from a spring at the side of the road in the Dalveen Pass. I remember the moorland grass was blowing in the wind.”
