Kirkcudbrightshire, still commonly called the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, is a historic county of south-west Scotland within the ancient district of Galloway, bounded by the Solway Firth to the south, Dumfriesshire to the east, Ayrshire to the north-west, and Wigtownshire across the River Cree to the west. Its unusual title dates from the forfeiture of the estates of the Earls of Douglas to the crown in the fifteenth century, after which the district was placed under a royally appointed steward rather than the ordinary sheriff used elsewhere in Scotland, a distinction of name that endured long after the office itself had become, in practice, much like any other county's.
An eighteenth-century survey described a landscape of striking contrasts, wild and mountainous toward its inland borders with Dumfriesshire and Ayrshire, rising in places to nearly three thousand feet, yet softening toward the coast into fertile, well-watered vales carved by the Dee, the Ken, the Fleet and the Cree; the Ken's junction with the Dee formed Loch Ken, reckoned one of the most interesting lakes in the south of Scotland, while the Fleet's outlet to the sea was singled out for scenery of astonishing grandeur. Sheep grazed the higher hills in great numbers, their fleece dark-faced and hardy, while the county's black cattle, celebrated even then for the fine proportion of flesh they carried and their readiness to fatten, were already laying the foundation of the breed that would become known worldwide as the Galloway.
This pastoral county, once the heartland of an ancient and largely independent Gallovidian lordship descended from the old kingdom of Strathclyde, combined bleak upland grazing with some of the softest, most cultivated river scenery in southern Scotland, a duality that eighteenth-century travellers found as striking as any single feature of the landscape itself.