The Early Days…
The village was started by Danish Vikings as a fishing and coastal trading port, the sandy shore giving a hard where it was safe to beach ships at mid-tide on a falling tide, unload or load them from carts at low tide, then float them off on the next rising tide. At a time when roads inland were rutted tracks, most freight and much passenger traffic was by sea. This was only to change with the road improvers like Telford and MacAdam in the early 1800s. The illustration shows the ”Petrel” using a spar crane (topping lift) to unload coals from Whitehaven onto carts at Carsethorn beach as late as 1920. Built in 1852 at Liverpool, ”Petrel” was the smallest of British topsail schooners; it was finally broken up in the 1930s. Prints in The Steamboat Inn show that that local fishermen still used ‘haaf’ nets and worked their boats from the beach until well into the end of the twentieth century.
The Growth of Trade…
The channel of the River Nith moved closer to Carsethorn over time, until the deep water channel was near the shore. Carsethorn is first mentioned as a port, in 1562, when a ship was loading for Rochelle and Bordeaux. Later, the ‘Carse’, as it is fondly referred to, acted as an outport for Dumfries, with the larger ships anchoring in Carse Bay, before unloading their cargo. There was a great deal of trade through the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, chiefly coastal to ports either side of the Solway, to Ireland and to the Isle of Man.
A Smuggling Past ?…
There may also have been smuggling; until recently, the Blackett family of Arbigland preserved records of one family member who was both an Exciseman (‘Gauger’) and a smuggler. The amusing fact is that he informed on his fellow smugglers, who returned the compliment and so forced him to resign. However a more lucrative trade was to replace this – Scotland’s greatest export has not been its whiskey but its hard-working and ambitious people. Robert Burns was himself a ‘Gauger’ when living at Dumfries, preserving the ambivalent attitude to his trade in the poem ”The Deil’s Awa’ Wi’ the Exciseman”. His Excise sword can still be seen in the Robert Burns Centre in Dumfries.
John Paul Jones Was Here…
In 1760, one of the local lads, John Paul Jones, who was later to become famous as the founder of the American Navy, sailed from Carsethorn to England. He was then only 13. After a career in merchant shipping, he joined the Revolutionary Navy and crowned his career by defeating the English frigate ”Serapis” off Flamborough Head. On one cruise in the Irish Sea, he burnt coal ships at Whitehaven and raided the home of the Earl of Selkirk near Kirkcudbright.
American visitors may like to see the small cottage on Arbigland Estate where John Paul Jones was born. A small museum in the building shows what his early life would have been like and reproduces his cabin aboard his ship, the ”Bonne homme Richard”
From Carsethorn to America…
During the late 1700s and early 1800s there was a very high level of emigration to the American and Australian Colonies and newspaper advertisements show emigrant ships sailing regularly from Carsethorn. In 1775 the ”Lovely Nelly”, Captained by William Sheridan, took 82 emigrants to Lot 59 on Prince Edward Island. The reason for the families going was given as being ‘to get more bread’ – in Scotland they were almost destitute.
A rather grimmer export trade emerged with the transportation of convicts to Australia. They were marched down from Dumfries and housed in the barracks (later a warehouse) at the river’s edge. The whitewashed building remains to the south of the bus-stop in Carsethorn.
The coastal trade reached its peak in the late 1840’s with almost 25,000 tons entering the river and steamboats such as the ”Countess of Nithsdale” maintained long established links with Liverpool. It is said that in 1850, 10,000 people emigrated to North America, 7,000 to Australia and 4,000 to New Zealand through the ‘Carse’, leaving from the jetty which was constructed in 1840 by the Nith Navigation Commission and used by the Liverpool Steam Packet Company. The remains of that jetty still stand beside the deep-water channel at the north end of Carsethorn; apparently it was a triangular structure, whose longest face allowed the steamers a good pierhead to come alongside.
A Slow Decline…
In one photograph of the ”Petrel” beached at Carsethorn there is a wooden structure in the background. According to Ernie Robinson and Alfred Truckell, this was the slipway of a former piloting and lifeboat station run by local fishermen. The garage opposite ‘Spindrift Cottage’ was at one time the boathouse. The gradual failure of the Nith trade and of fishing ended this service.
During the 1870s and 1880s the local Captain, John Robson, traded in the ”Defiance” to Archangel for timber, but this was in the face of a general decline. The coming of the railway in 1850, along with the ongoing costs of the many improvements needed to the navigable channel started a slow decline in the seaborne trade and by the early 1900s very little trade was left.
The Tourist Future…
The ‘Steamboat’ was already trading as an Inn in 1813, but its name first named on the 1854 Ordnance Map. Bunks where travellers and sailors could sleep were built into the walls on the Inn and were still visible until a short while ago. Now it is the centre of a quiet little village, nestling on the shore of the Solway. The new attractions for visitors lie in the history of surrounding villages such as New Abbey, Dalbeattie and Kippford, as well as the local beaches and the bird-rich merse where millions of seabirds live or over-winter. Visitors to the National Nature Reserve on the far side of the Nith come round by the coachload to watch birds on the Carsethorn foreshore, before continuing to the nature reserves at Southwick and Mersehead. Ironically, Liverpool firms are often the ones providing the coaches.
Situated as it is almost in the middle of the coast between Dalbeattie and Dumfries, the Steamboat offers an excellent base for those wishing to walk in the nearby hills – including the famous Screel, Scotland’s most southerly mountain – and cycling in the nearby woodlands. Dalbeattie Woods and its Seven Stanes cycle track is within easy reach. For the less vigorous, the ever-changing panorama of sea, sky and distant Cumbrian hills, are a splendid sight.