Crocketford: The village that a religious sect helped to found

“Crocketford didn’t really exist before the arrival of the Buchanites in 1787,” explains one history of the village.

“It was simply a meeting of drove roads, some coming down from Ayr and Girvan and some from as far as Portpatrick and beyond.”

To say the Buchanites had a chequered history before they secured their tenancy at a farm in the area would be something of an understatement.

The movement was named after its charismatic leader Elspeth Buchan, born in Banffshire in the late 1730s.

She became convinced she was an incarnation of a woman referred to in the Bible as being “clad with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and mother of a wonderful child”.