There’s a peculiar feeling of peace inside the Galloway Arms in Crocketford as Pat Watson tells her remarkable story.
“You couldn’t print most of it,” she laughs as daughter Paula arrives with the coffees.
It turns out that the hotel’s history is as colourful as that of its owner who tells me there’s a ghostly reason for the Galloway’s other-worldly sense of calm.
“It used to be a convent when the Buchanites formed Crocketford,” Pat explains.
“It’s their founder Elizabeth Buchan that haunts this place. I have felt her presence very, very strongly.
“I don’t really believe in any of that but I can assure you she is definitely in this place. She is friendly, though.”
Elizabeth’s followers, it seems, thought she was “the woman clothed with the sun” Revelations Chapter 12 and in the 1780s the sect made the building, which is now the Galloway Arms, their temple.
She died in 1791 and despite her elevation to heaven appears to have left part of herself behind in the hotel.
“We had a young boy staying with us who went by the name of Hiya,” Pat, 72, tells me.
“I was in bed one night and I felt this person crawling in beside me.
“There was this strong smell of lavender and for some reason I thought it was Hiya with his aftershave.
“I turned round to give him a right swearing and tell him to get back to his own bed.
“Then my hair stood straight on end because there was no-one there.
“Yet I felt her getting into bed with me and this powerful smell of lavender. After that, I was never feart.
“She made herself known to me maybe, because she knew we were good people.
“We’ve had coffee cups and breakfast dishes moved around as well.
“People staying at the hotel have also felt her presence.”
The Watson family, Pat says, have been in the hotel for since 1995 when her larger than life husband, James “Noky” Watson, bought the business for his wife.
The couple had just split up but maintained a close business relationship and remained loving parents to seven children.
Daughter Paula, who now runs the successful hotel, came into the business aged 20, when Pat, then 46, took over.
It’s still difficult for her to talk about the day tragedy struck in 2004, when Noky, 59, went on a run to Dumfries for supplies.
“The day he died Noky was here out in the garden taking his grandson Keiran for a walk,” Pat explains sadly.
“He left to go the cash and carry and collapsed when he was there.
“He was taken to Dumfries hospital then was flown to Glasgow by helicopter.
“He died on the operating table that night at 10pm.”
It’s clear that Pat holds Noky’s memory dear as she tells of the impact his death had on the family.
“He never got to see his grandweans grow up,” she says. “
He held the family together through all our ups and downs.
“And when he died it was absolutely devastating. I could not believe it and it affected the whole family very deeply,
“I think he would be proud of the way the hotel has been revived and very proud that Paula is working in it.”
Pat’s road to meeting Noky was, as the song goes, a long and winding one.
A Crocketford lassie through and through, Pat spent the first seven years of her life at Little Milton, just up the road.
Conditions in the Turner family’s rented cottage were crude with no running water, inside toilet or electricity.
“My father Geordie was a long distance lorry driver with Halliday’s,” she recalls.
“There were four children – myself, John, Derek and Gordon, my dad and mum Margaret in the house.
“Sometimes he would be away for a week at a time. I really loved my dad and loved when he came home.
“We only had two bedrooms and all the weans slept in the same one.
“All we had for heat was the fire in the living room and the big range.
“There was no kitchen and the sink was in there as well.
“We just played outside all the time and it was brilliant – kick the can and sledging in the winter.
“We just got corrugated iron sheets and slid doon the hills on them. It was great – we loved it.”
Pat’s childhood memories seem a million miles from the world of TikTok and Instagram – and she reckons young people these days are somehow losing out.
“It’s really hard for the young ones nowadays,” she says. “There’s that many computers and phones – there’s just too much electronic stuff available to them.
“I was never in the hoose – I spent a lot of time in the burn guddling for fish or going round Milton Loch hunting for peeweets’ eggs.
“I can’t mind if we cooked them or not but we probably did – we were not very wealthy at all.
“We would go ice skating on the loch too when it was frozen and walked a mile and back over the fields to Milton school every day.
“I was happy at Little Milton.
“Pops and gaga – our grannie – were in the Haugh of Urr and she would come every Wednesday and bring us comics.
“I used to rush home from school to see what comics she’d brought.
“That was one of the highlights of the week.”
Growing up in the fifties in accommodation which these days would be declared unfit for human habitation, the Turner family had to make the best of things.
“We used to have a tin bath beside the fire and all the weans would take their turn going into it,” smiles Pat.
“That was once a week.
“Because there was no running water mum would heat the water in a kettle on an iron plate on the big black range.
“We had hens and ducks for eggs and mum would do the washing in the outhoose, scrubbing the clothes on a wooden slatted washboard.
“Summers were really hot and coming home from school John and I would take our socks off and burst the tar bubbles on the road.
“Mum would give us a row and put margarine on our feet to take off the tar.
“We used to run a pole and walk a pole on the way home too, But I was a really clumsy wean and was always fa’ing over.
“When I stood up the hem of my dress would be in the grass and that would get me another swearing.
“Another highlight for us was walking down to grannie and grandpa’s at Burnside, just outside Crocketford.
“They had a huge garden and we picked gooseberries and raspberries up the back of the garden.”
Pat remembers well the day when, as a seven-year-old, she and her family flitted after Geordie switched jobs.
“My mum did not like my dad being away and I mind them having rows about it,” she says.
“She was a right wee tyrant and very fiery – she had a tongue that would clip cloots.
“My dad was the opposite and he was known as gentleman George. How he put up with her I have no idea.
“But he gave up the driving and became dairyman for old Adam Barbour at Auchengibbert Farm.
“And I can assure you when we got in the house my eyes fair
lit up.
“There was leccy and running water and me and John ran round the house switching the lights on and off and turning on the taps.
“The house had three bedrooms, a toilet and a kitchen as well!”
Seven years later the family was on the move again, this time to Barholm Mains near Creetown where Geordie had landed the dairyman’s job.
“I was 14 and that was when I first met Noky, at a record hop in Creetown in 1963.
“I was interested but he was four years older. He said I was far too young.
“I got a job as a nannie in Newton Stewart looking after Mr and Mrs McLauchlan’s wee lassie Wendy, who was a lovely wee thing.
“They were hairdressers at the top of the town – I mind Mrs McLauchlan was always well-dressed and beautifully made up.
“I did some housework and cooking there as well.
“Then we moved to a farm in the hills behind Glenluce and I saw Noky now and again.
“I went to work in the Baby Deer factory in Stranraer making baby shoes.
“It was quite a big place – it had about 50 folk working there, mostly women.
“We all had a machine each and my job was to stitch on the soles then pass the shoes along the line for the next bit.”
She was not at the factory long, Pat informs me, for a very good reason – she and Noky got married.
“I was 16 and the wedding was in Kirkcowan Parish Church,” she says.
“We had the reception in the Galloway Arms Hotel in Newton Stewart.”
Were there any regrets about tying the knot so young, I wonder.
“Maybe later on I thought I had missed out,” replies Pat. “But at the time I didn’t think about it.”
Noky found work at a piggery on Kirkbride farm at Carsluith, then the couple got dairy work at Milton Farm near Kirkcudbright.
“There were that many cows and they were milked three times a day,” recalls Pat.
“I was 19, had two wee kids and was a full time mother.
“But Noky needed help so I would take the pram into the byre in the morning with Graham at one end and James at the other.
“That’s where I learned to milk coos.”
More dairy jobs at Butterhole near Dalbeattie and Ae village followed before the Watson family headed back west.
Soon, not entirely to her liking Pat admits, her Noky began playing pop music to earn more cash.
“We came back to Galloway when Noky got a job at Carseminnoch Farm near Newton Stewart,” she recalls.
“I was only 21 and had four kids by then.
“Noky starting doing his discos and he wouldn’t get back till one or two in the morning.
“Sometimes I would have to do the dairy for him.
“We moved to Cairnholy and Noky was really into the discos then and he told me to go out and get a job.
“So I started at Auchenlarie cleaning then I ended up doing the bar, waitressing and cooking.
“I just took the weans doon with me – I was 26 and had five of them.
“We moved to Gatehouse next and Noky worked in the woods at Laurieston.
“Then he bought John Wilson’s fish shop and we became fishmongers.
“We went up to the fish market in Glasgow twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, and would be there for 2am.
“Noky would drive up and I would drive back and he would usually sleep on the way home.”
Next steps in their changing lifestyle, Pat tells me, were moves into the licenced and betting trades.
“Noky bought the Bank of Fleet and we were there for five years,” she recalls.
“We had the restaurant at Auchenlarie and then the Thistle in Castle Douglas.
“When we were in the Thistle Noky went back to the woods and I basically ran the pub.
“We worked in the bookies at Dalbeattie - I wanted to take it on but Noky hated it.
“Dalbeattie was a lovely place and I got right into the horses as well.
“Four of us – Curly White, Bobby Greggan, Noky and me had a syndicate and owned two race horses, Fifty Quid Extra and Jolly Courtesan.
“One time Fifty Quid was running at Ayr and the trainer told the boys it had no chance.
“I was in the Thistle and went to the bookies in CD to put a tenner on at 14/1 – and it won.
“The boys hadn’t put a bet on – they weren’t happy I was bragging about it when they got home!”
Noky took on the tenancy of Dunjap farm near Crossmichael, unsuccessfully, and bought a grocer’s shop in Creetown.
But since his sad death it has been the Galloway Arms and her family of seven children, 26 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren “and another on the way” which have been the mainstays of Pat’s life.
“We have had a good turn in the hotel in last few years,” she says.
“People say it’s such a friendly place.
“Paula would talk to a swinging door. She is very popular.”
