Gretna is in Dumfries and Galloway, in the south of Scotland, on the M74 near the border to England, and near the mouth of the River Esk. The township is distinct from the smaller nearby village of Gretna Green, famous for marriages, which borders but is a separate area from Gretna proper. To the West in Scotland are Eastriggs (about 5 miles to the West) and Annan (about 8 miles to the West), both situated on the B721 and linked to the nearby A75.
The village was notable for HM Factory, Gretna, codenamed Moorside, a huge cordite munitions factory built nearby on the shore of Solway Firth to supply ammunition to British forces during World War I. The factory, the biggest munitions factory ever built, stretched for nine miles from Eastriggs along the Solway coast as far as Longtown in England and two miles across. The factory took 10,000 navvies to build it, and employed 30,000 workers, mostly women. The workers mixed by hand a devil’s porridge of nitro-glycerine and guncotton.
Page viewed: 506 times
Gretna - Dumfries and Galloway purchased for: £ 10.00
Adverts are currently: Available: Click on the links below to purchase
Adverts for 3 months cost: £ 10
Town Rating Contributions: 0
About Gretna - Dumfries and Galloway
Gretna Football Club is a Scottish football club from Gretna, near Annan, Dumfries and Galloway and promoted to the Scottish Premier League in the 06/07 season. Their current manager is Davie Irons. Owned by businessman Brooks Mileson, who has poured vast amounts of money into the club, they have gone from being a non-league side playing in the Northern Premier League First Division in England to a 2007/08 place in the Scottish Premier League (by virtue of a last-day win against Ross County on 28 April 2007), in five years.An amateur team before in the town, called Gretna Green F.C. had existed in the 19th century, but were bankrupt by the 1920s. This left the area without a team until Gretna FC was founded in 1946, who played locally in Dumfries. The following year, they made the unusual move of transferring to a league run by the English Football Association, the Carlisle and District League, despite being a Scottish based club. This reflects Gretna's location on the border between the two countries. They remained in this league for all but one season until 1982, moving to the newly created second division of the Northern League. They won the league and were promoted immediately, before back-to-back championship wins in the first division, in 1990/1991 and 1991/1992, resulted in their promotion to the first division of the Northern Premier League.
During the 1990s, they also became the first club from Scotland to appear in the FA Cup proper since Rangers had done so in 1887. The club, however, saw its future in Scottish football and applied twice to the Scottish league in 1993 and 1999. To help boost their later application, they played a Rangers XI team in a game to raise money for victims of the Lockerbie air disaster. To their credit, Gretna won 2-1 against a strong team.
Gretna Green is a small but thriving town on the west coast in the south of Scotland. It is in Dumfries and Galloway, near the mouth of the River Esk, and has a railway station serving both Gretna Green and Gretna. The Quintinshill rail crash, with 227 deaths the worst rail crash in Britain, occurred near Gretna Green in 1915.
Its main claim to fame are the Blacksmith's Shops, where many runaway marriages were performed. These began in 1753 when an Act of Parliament, Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act, was passed in England, which stated that if both parties to a marriage were not at least 21 years old, then consent to the marriage had to be given by the parents. This Act did not apply in Scotland where it was possible for boys to get married at 14 and girls at 12 years old with or without parental consent. Since 1929 both parties have had to be at least 16 years old but there is still no consent needed. In England and Wales the ages are now 16 with consent and 18 without. In addition, English law required the "asking of the banns" (periodic announcements of an impending marriage, with an invitation for anybody who knew of a reason the parties could not marry to state the reason) or, later, the advance issuance of a license for a marriage to be legal; this allowed people who opposed a marriage—even one that could be performed legally—to know that it was planned, and thus possibly to prevent it.
