The River Dee (), in south-west

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

, flows from its source in Loch Dee amongst the Galloway Hills, firstly to Clatteringshaws Loch, then into Loch Ken, where it joins the Water of Ken. From there, the Dee flows southwards to

Kirkcudbright Kirkcudbright ( ; ) is a town at the mouth of the River Dee, Galloway, River Dee in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, southwest of Castle Douglas and Dalbeattie. A former royal burgh, it is the traditional county town of Kirkcudbrightshire. His ...

, and into Kirkcudbright Bay to reach the

Solway Firth The Solway Firth is an inlet on the west coast of Great Britain, forming part of the border between England and Scotland. The firth (a Scottish term for an inlet of the sea) divides Cumbria (including the Solway Plain) from Dumfries and Gallow ...

. The distance is just over in total. Together with its tributaries, the Dee's total catchment area is over . The river is dammed at

Tongland Tongland, also spelt Tongueland () is a small village about north of Kirkcudbright, in the historic county of Kirkcudbrightshire in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. It lies on the west bank of the River Dee, Galloway, Dee near its confluence ...

, two miles (3 km) upriver from Kirkcudbright. This was constructed as part of the Galloway hydro-electric power scheme in the 1930s. Also at this site is Tongland Bridge, built in 1806 by

Thomas Telford Thomas Telford (9 August 1757 – 2 September 1834) was a Scottish civil engineer. After establishing himself as an engineer of road and canal projects in Shropshire, he designed numerous infrastructure projects in his native Scotland, as well ...

. The ruins of Threave Castle stand on an island on the lower part of the Dee. In

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...

's 2nd century work ''Geography'' it is recorded as ''Dēoúa''. This form represents a development of

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-Euro ...

'' *deiueh₂-'' 'a goddess', which occurs in many Celtic river-names. The Battle of the River Dee may have been fought at this river or at River Cree in 1308, during the Scottish Wars of Independence. The Dee has also been known as the Black Water of Dee because of its dark colour in the stretch above Loch Ken. Loch Ken and the Dee Marshes were together designated a

Ramsar site A Ramsar site is a wetland site designated to be of international importance under the Ramsar Convention,8 ha (O) *** Permanent 8 ha (P) *** Seasonal Intermittent < 8 ha(Ts) **

in the tidal stretch of the river. The headwater streams of the Tarff drain the tract of country between the villages of Laurieston and Ringford including Loch Mannoch. The river should not be confused with the similarly named Tarf Water which is a tributary of the River Bladnoch further west in Galloway. The name Tarff derives from the

root ''*tauro-'' '

bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not Castration, castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e. cows proper), bulls have long been an important symbol cattle in r ...

aurochs The aurochs (''Bos primigenius''; or ; pl.: aurochs or aurochsen) is an extinct species of Bovini, bovine, considered to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. With a shoulder height of up to in bulls and in cows, it was one of t ...

'. Bulls occur frequently in Celtic river names, and these names may have had a mythological rather than literal referent. Like other examples of this name in southern Scotland, 'Tarff' is Gaelic in form but is likely to derive in turn from an earlier

Cumbric Cumbric is an extinct Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the ''Hen Ogledd'' or "Old North", in Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands. It was closely related to Old Welsh and the ot ...

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dee Rivers of Dumfries and Galloway Ramsar sites in Scotland Dee Basin (Kirkcudbright)

See also

References