Barony Hostel

A military camp on an estate

The Devil’s Porridge Museum traces Barony’s wartime beginnings to the Galbraith family estate near Dumfries. Its account describes the British Army and a Jewish Pioneer Corps building huts, first for training and subsequently for prisoners from Germany, Austria and other countries. This history helps explain why accommodation existed at Parkgate when wartime detention gave way to postwar movements of people.

The estate at the centre of all this was Kirkmichael House, a large asymmetrical Jacobean mansion built in 1834 to designs by William Burn, with a service range and courtyard to the west and a quadrangular walled garden of about the same date. It stands at NY 022870, just south of Parkgate and about eight miles north of Dumfries. The huts went up in its grounds rather than in the house.

Something survives of what the German prisoners made of the place. The Wiener Holocaust Library holds a 44 page Christmas issue of Litfassaeule, described as the camp newspaper of Barony Camp No 298, printed in German and lavishly illustrated with colour block prints. Its editor was Erich Voss and its illustrators Otto Rohse, Heinz Kowald and Karl Buehler, and the catalogue lists re-education, poetry, religion and Christianity among its subjects. The library records the dates only as uncertain, so the issue cannot be pinned to a year.

The hutted landscape

Historic Environment Scotland’s record identifies a large camp within the Kirkmichael House estate. An archaeological reading of aerial photographs taken on 20 May 1948 found at least 90 huts, mainly Nissen huts, in the main section. The compound lay chiefly northwest of the house, with a perimeter fence, an extension enclosure and further huts nearby. Possible staff quarters were identified to the northeast. These are observations of the camp’s physical layout, rather than a count of its Ukrainian occupants.

The Ukrainian route through Barony

Kormylo’s map and appendix name Barony Hostel, Parkgate, among Scottish accommodation used by Ukrainians. His account of the men transferred from Rimini to Britain reports 462 sent to Barony and immediately transferred to Hallmuir. He reproduces a handwritten list showing the same number beside Barony Camp and camp number 298. The page captions the dispersal as 1947, while the reproduced sheet carries 1948 dating and a note about copying the information in March 1948. The safest reading is a documented Barony entry and an attributed onward movement, without assigning an exact transfer day.

The figure sits inside a larger count. Reading the same handwritten sheet, Kormylo reports 965 men sent to Haddington in East Lothian and 462 to Barony, and puts the total Ukrainian prisoners of war dispersed around Scotland at 1,427. He is explicit that this total excludes European Voluntary Workers already living in the camps and Ukrainians who came through the Polish Resettlement Scheme. These are men counted as they moved, not beds at Barony.

Published accounts of the journey do not agree. A compilation of Scottish displaced persons material states that between 420 and 450 Ukrainian prisoners reached Glasgow docks from Rimini on the morning of 27 May 1947, stayed briefly at Happendon Lodge and Carstairs, and were taken by train to Lockerbie on 6 June 1947 to march to Hallmuir. That account does not mention Barony at all. Kormylo’s route does. Both cannot be complete, and neither rests on a movement order that has been produced, so the Barony entry is best treated as a documented staging point whose place in the sequence is still open.

The camp after the huts

The historic-environment record describes the removal of the main huts after closure and a small housing estate on the northern part, named Beech Avenue on Ordnance Survey mapping. A 2021 site visit photographed houses, a path and wooded margins in this area, with other parts returned to farmland. The modern streetscape is part of the camp’s afterlife; it does not reproduce the arrangement of accommodation known to the postwar residents.

The wider estate found a new purpose. The Barony Agricultural College was founded here in 1974 and Kirkmichael House was extended and converted for college use between 1984 and 1991. Since 2012 the 260 hectare farming and woodland estate has been the Barony Campus of Scotland’s Rural College. Visitors should note that a second, more modern Kirkmichael House stands on the other side of Parkgate.