The local granite quarries provided cargo during the 1800s, along with potatoes, turnips, charcoal and timber for the industrial towns of Lancashire, while coal came back from Cumbria: our port is only 20-odd nautical miles from the northern Lake District. Other cargoes traded in and out of Palnackie included barley, treacle, cattle feed and oats. Palnackie itself had timber yards and water-powered sawmills.
The Customs House in Palnackie opened around 1830, separated from the Glenisle Inn by a weighbridge. The inn itself was built from bricks brought in as ship ballast. In 1849, the burn from Big Barwhinnie Loch exiting into the port was converted to a timber-faced dock, which accommodated vessels of up to 350 tons. Via a sluice gate at the loch, the burn was used to flush silt from the basin during ebb tides.
Sailors, fishermen, farm labourers - and the odd sea captain - now made up a large part of the population of the village. Were there some people that ran a smuggling sideline? We honestly don’t know, officer… However, because of the different rates of duty between England, Scotland and the Isle of Man on goods like salt, tea, wines, spirits and tobacco, the Solway saw its fair share of smuggling traffic, and tales about that survive to this day (for background try reading the fast-paced adventure story The Raiders by S.R. Crockett).
Navigation on the Urr Water - Palnackie’s river coming down from Loch Urr -, from the port to the Rough Firth and then into the Solway Firth, has always been challenging. The Solway coast has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world. A day spent in Palnackie will see the Urr Water expose most of its muddy banks, for the waters to rise again to the full width of its flow. The speed of the tides means that the shape of sandbanks and navigable channels is in constant flux. If the captains weren’t local, local pilots would need to manoeuvre the ships to and from the port to avoid getting stranded, and due to the river’s sharp bends, Clydesdale horses were used to tow the vessels.
During the 1940s and 50s, barges would still unload fertiliser, and ammunition for the Edingham military depot, but the 60s saw road transport being scaled up exponentially, while a lot of traffic had already switched to rail before. After that, a few cockling and fishing vessels, and occasional pleasure craft, kept the port going. It was in 1973 that commercial activity finished in the port.
While Palnackie had several lorry businesses - Halliday, Paterson, Sturrock, Hawthorne, Bell - T.P. Niven, the road haulage company that started in Palnackie in 1926 with one lorry transporting raw materials for fertilizer from the port, have steadily expanded since then and are now carrying the torch for nationwide transport run from here.
Presently, the once busy port is well past its heyday, but is held dear in our village. One of the original quay walls collapsed in 2023 and is being replaced, and the port is still an enduring feature of Palnackie. Seafaring is part of what made our village.
Along with contributions from Jim Bell - https://www.facebook.com/groups/stewartrypostcards -, most of the information in this section has been taken from Ernie H. Robinson’s book Salt in their Blood - Mariners of the North Solway - Their Ships and Shipbuilders (2016), available from the local libraries.