Kirkcudbright’s Lifeboat team is turning its focus from the sea to the land.
The organisation is in the early stages of turning a patch of land beside the crew room on Dee Road into a garden.
And the centrepiece will be the wheel from the town’s old lifeboat the Mary Pullman.
Lifeboat operations manager, John Collins, said: “The council used to maintain the garden and cut the grass but that has stopped due to funding cuts.
“Earlier this year a tree was dangerous and had to be removed, which the RNLI paid for. We had to check the ownership of the land and it turned out only a thin strip belongs to the RNLI.
“We think the rest may belong to West Coast Sea Products but we need to have that confirmed.
“We had our AGM recently and the issue of the land and what to do with it came up and someone suggested turning it into a garden.
“There’s a few gardens in the town that don’t look as nice since the council stopped maintaining them but this is quite a prominent one so it would be good to have it looking nice.”
He added: “Five or six years ago we were given the wheel from the Mary Pullman, which was the old lifeboat in Kirkcudbright.
“The last we knew was it was at a car park in a garden centre in Lincolnshire but someone gave us the wheel and we want to do something with it before it ends up as scrap.
“What we’d like to do is have it displayed in the garden and also have a picnic bench and a memorial bench as well. There’s a company in Dumfries that does them from reclaimed plastic.
“We’re also hoping to have some information boards because the lifeboat station itself is about four miles outside the town so it would be nice to have some signs up letting people know about the RNLI in Kirkcudbright.
“It would probably cost about £1,000 and it couldn’t come from RNLI funds, it would have to be separate.”
