Foxglove Cottage

The small one on a five-property estate

Balbeg is an estate in the Water of Girvan valley about two miles south of Straiton, with five self-catering properties on it and room for forty people. Foxglove is the smallest, which is rather the point of it. A family of four gets the run of the estate without taking on a house built for sixteen.

The operator calls it new built with a high standard of finish throughout, and the layout is more generous than the sleeps number suggests. The lounge holds the wood burning stove and a smart TV, there is a separate dining room rather than a table pushed against the kitchen wall, and outside a private area with patio furniture.

Heating is worth a line. The whole estate runs on a 199kW woodchip biomass boiler installed in 2014, fed with chip from two miles down the road, and a 27kW hydro scheme on the Balbeg Burn has been generating since 2012. The wood burner sits on top of that rather than in place of it.

Good to know

Features

Location

Where it puts you

Most of what there is to do here starts at the door. The Pond Walk is a flat quarter of an hour around a nature pond with a bird hide on it, the River Walk half an hour along the Balbeg Burn, and the Bennan Hill Walk a strenuous hour to the summit. Balbeg's own wildlife list runs to herons, otters, badgers, deer, red squirrels, and birds of prey.

Galloway Forest Park begins about a mile away by the estate's reckoning, covers 300 square miles, and was Britain's first dark sky park, so a clear night here is worth staying up for. West on the coast are Culzean Castle and its 600 acres of grounds, and Alloway has the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. South and east the country runs on into Dumfries and Galloway, while north is the rest of Ayrshire and the coast road.