Getting here

The last forty minutes are on foot.

Newton Stewart is the last place with a shop. From there it is a forest road, a locked gate you are given the code to, and forty minutes on foot with what you are carrying.

3 ways in

From Glasgow
2 h 45 driving
M77 and the A77 down the Ayrshire coast, then the A714 inland at Girvan. The last twelve miles are single track with passing places.
From Carlisle
2 h 15 driving
A75 west through Dumfries and Newton Stewart. The most straightforward approach and the one to use in winter.
From Stranraer
1 h driving
For anyone arriving by ferry from Belfast. East on the A75, then north at Newton Stewart.

240 metres up

The bothy sits at 240 m in a glen, which is low, damp and often cloudy. This site does not pretend otherwise. What the Park has is not thin dry air — it is the absence of anything for thirty miles in any direction.

The coordinates are 55.000° north, 4.400° west. Those two numbers are what every figure on this site is computed from — including the one that tells you the galactic centre climbs to 6.0° here. That is low, and there is no getting around it: from this latitude the centre of the galaxy grazes the southern horizon and is never far enough up to be worth much. What this latitude has instead is the northern sky, circumpolar and available every clear night of the year.

When to come: September to March

Not a preference: an arithmetic fact. Between early May and early August this latitude has no astronomical darkness whatsoever, and the ledger on the sky page marks every one of those nights in red. Come in the half of the year that has nights in it.

Every night of 2026, drawn as the hours between astronomical dusk and astronomical dawn, with September to March shaded. 89% of this property’s astronomical darkness falls inside the season it advertises — 2,117 of 2,368 hours, across 212 nights. The season is a sentence in a content file and this is the arithmetic that checks it.

2,368 hours
Of true astronomical darkness in a year, computed night by night from this latitude. That is what you are actually buying.
90 nights
A year on which the sun never reaches eighteen degrees below the horizon, so there is no astronomical darkness at all. We would rather tell you that than sell you one of them.
9 h 02
Of darkness on the night this page was built for. It moves by several hours across the year, and every page here recomputes it rather than quoting an average.