Explore the real places in Galloway that appear in The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Portland Place, Marylebone, Strand / Charing Cross Area, Galloway Moorlands, Moffat, Annandale, The Borders Railway Corridor and 8 more.
Portland Place, London — Hannay's flat and the murder scene
Richard Hannay has taken a flat in Portland Place, London, feeling desperately bored with his life after returning from South Africa. It is here that the American spy Franklin Scudder turns up at his door, spinning a wild tale of an assassination plot targeting the Greek Prime Minister and a shadowy organisation called the Black Stone. Days later, Hannay returns home to find Scudder stabbed through the heart in his flat, and realises he is now both a murder suspect and a target for the killers who silenced Scudder.
Portland Place is one of London's grandest Georgian thoroughfares, laid out by the Adam brothers in the 1770s. It has long been associated with embassies, professional institutions, and upper-middle-class residential apartments. The BBC's Broadcasting House sits at its southern end.
Portland Place remains a prestigious address in Marylebone, home to several embassies and the Royal Institute of British Architects. The street's Georgian townhouses are largely intact, and the area is easily walkable from Regent's Park.
Visit: Portland Place (landmark)
Charing Cross, London — Hannay's flight from London begins
With Scudder dead in his flat and the police closing in, Hannay makes his desperate escape from London via the main railway terminus at Charing Cross. He disguises himself as a milkman and slips away before the net tightens, purchasing a ticket for Scotland — the land of his birth — where he believes he can lose himself in the open countryside. The opening chapters of the chase are driven by his frantic calculation that London is too dangerous and that open country gives him the best chance of survival.
Charing Cross Station opened in 1864 as the London terminus of the South Eastern Railway, built on the site of the old Hungerford Market. It has been one of London's primary gateways to the south-east and to connecting services northward ever since.
Charing Cross Station remains a busy commuter hub on the Embankment side of the Strand, serving southeastern England. The Eleanor Cross replica stands in the station forecourt, and the surrounding area is one of the most visited parts of central London.
Visit: Charing Cross Station (landmark)
Dumfries and Galloway, SW Scotland — Hannay's first days on the run
After leaping from a train in the Scottish Lowlands, Hannay takes to the bleak heathery moorlands of Galloway and Dumfries-shire to evade his pursuers. He sleeps rough, moves by night, and begins deciphering Scudder's coded notebook. The landscape here is crucially both his shield and his vulnerability — vast enough to lose himself in, but open enough that strangers are immediately conspicuous. Buchan renders the moors with vivid affection, and Hannay's resourcefulness in this terrain is tested from the outset.
Galloway is one of Scotland's most sparsely populated regions, a landscape of granite hills, heather moor, and ancient farmsteads. It was familiar to Buchan who holidayed in the region, and the bleak upland terrain he describes is readily recognisable throughout Dumfries and Galloway.
Galloway Forest Park is now one of the UK's largest forests and a designated Dark Sky Park. The moorland and hill country remains much as Buchan described it, and walkers following Hannay's fictional route can explore much of the landscape on the Southern Upland Way long-distance footpath.
Visit: Galloway Forest Park (park)
Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway — Hannay shelters and finds an ally
Hannay passes through the market town and spa village of Moffat during his southerly wanderings in the Lowlands, seeking food and shelter while avoiding the police who are hunting him as Scudder's murderer. The small, isolated communities of this Annandale valley typify Buchan's portrait of provincial Scottish life — some residents are sympathetic and ask no questions, while Hannay is perpetually anxious that a suspicious innkeeper or a sharp-eyed constable might give him away.
Moffat developed as a spa town in the 17th century when mineral springs were discovered nearby, and it became a popular resort for Edinburgh's gentry. It sits in the Annan valley surrounded by rounded Border hills and was a staging post on droving routes from the Highlands.
Moffat is a charming small town popular with walkers and tourists exploring the Southern Uplands. It is famed for its wide high street, the wrought-iron Ram statue, and the nearby Devil's Beef Tub — a dramatic natural hollow that appears in other Scottish adventure fiction.
Visit: Moffat Town Centre (landmark)
Tweed Valley / Borders region — Hannay travels by road and rail
As Hannay moves northward and then is forced back south, he navigates the old coaching roads and branch railways of the Scottish Borders, sometimes stealing a lift on a car, sometimes walking cross-country. In one bravura scene he disguises himself as a road-mender and coolly converses with the pursuing Black Stone agents who drive straight past him. The Tweed valley and its surrounding hills form the setting for some of the most tense early pursuit sequences in the novel.
The Scottish Borders were served by an extensive railway network in the Edwardian era, including the Waverley Route linking Edinburgh to Carlisle through Hawick and Galashiels. The region's landscape of rolling hills and river valleys has been farmed and settled since prehistoric times.
The Borders Railway between Edinburgh and Tweedbank was reopened in 2015 after 46 years, partly restoring rail links to this beautiful region. The road network Hannay used is still navigable by car, and the area is popular for cycling and fishing.
Visit: Borders Railway (landmark)
Kinross-shire, Central Scotland — Hannay crosses the Highland fringe
As Hannay pushes further north into the wilder country beyond the Lowlands, he crosses the transitional landscape of Kinross and Perthshire, moving through farmland and loch-side terrain that begins to take on the character of the true Highlands. The geography of central Scotland is rendered by Buchan with precision — Hannay must keep moving, and each night brings a new hiding place in a barn, a shepherd's bothy, or a hollow in the heather as aeroplanes and motor cars converge on his trail.
Loch Leven is famous as the prison of Mary Queen of Scots, who was held on its island castle from 1567 to 1568. The surrounding Kinross-shire countryside was an important agricultural and linen-weaving district in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Loch Leven is now a National Nature Reserve and internationally important wetland, famous for its wintering pink-footed geese. Loch Leven Castle on its island is managed by Historic Environment Scotland and accessible by ferry in the summer months.
Visit: Loch Leven Castle (historic site)
Perthshire, Highland Scotland — Deep country, the heart of the chase
Buchan places Hannay deep in the Perthshire and Argyll Highlands — wild glens, rushing burns, and bare mountain ridges — where he must outrun not only the Black Stone agents but an aeroplane conducting an aerial search. In a memorable scene, Hannay lies flat in the heather and controls his breathing as the biplane circles overhead, correctly calculating that a man who moves will be spotted, while a man who becomes part of the landscape will not. This almost mystical relationship between fugitive and terrain is one of the novel's great achievements.
Glen Lyon in Perthshire is reputedly Scotland's longest and most beautiful glen, stretching for some thirty miles through remote hill country. The area was cleared of much of its population during the 18th- and 19th-century Highland Clearances, leaving a sparsely peopled landscape of sheep farms and deer forest.
Glen Lyon remains one of Scotland's most remote and atmospheric glens, accessible by a single-track road from Fortingall. It is a popular destination for hillwalkers and those seeking dramatic scenery, with the mountains of the Loch Lyon area rising to over 1,000 metres.
Visit: Glen Lyon (park)
Remote Highland farmhouse — Hannay's unlikely ally
In one of the novel's most comic and charming episodes, Hannay takes shelter with a fiery Scottish radical innkeeper — a passionate Liberal and anti-establishment talker — who gives him food, shelter, and clothing without asking his name. Hannay lets the man rant about politics and class, and in return receives the hospitality that saves his life. The encounter captures Buchan's affectionate if paternalistic portrait of Scottish rural character, and the innkeeper never suspects his guest is a fugitive.
The rural inn or country public house was a central social institution in Edwardian Scotland, particularly in remote areas where they served as community meeting places. Political radicalism — Liberal, Labour, and nationalist — was strong in rural Scotland in the early 20th century.
The fictional innkeeper's house is set in the general area of highland Perthshire or Argyll. Numerous historic droving inns survive across highland Scotland, some still operating, offering a flavour of the hospitality Buchan describes.
Rural Galloway/Dumfries-shire — Hannay impersonates a politician
In one of the novel's great set-pieces, Hannay stumbles upon a Liberal politician named Sir Harry — who is scheduled to speak at a public meeting — and realises that the man is his physical double. When Sir Harry is taken ill, Hannay audaciously takes his place and delivers a rousing political speech to a village hall packed with constituents, improvising wildly but successfully. It is a moment of high comedy and suspense, and demonstrates Hannay's gift for quick thinking and disguise that will sustain him throughout the novel.
Country house culture was central to Edwardian political life in Scotland, with landowners and gentry hosting Liberal and Unionist politicians throughout the constituency season. Village hall political meetings were the primary form of democratic engagement before broadcasting.
Numerous Edwardian-era village halls survive across Dumfries and Galloway, many still in community use. The country house tradition continues in the form of Scotland's many historic house hotels and estate properties.
Moorland edge, SW Scotland — The Black Stone's terrifying trap
In one of the most genuinely frightening episodes in the novel, Hannay seeks shelter with a man who appears to be a lonely literary-minded innkeeper, deep in the moors. The man seems sympathetic and cultivated, quoting poetry and offering whisky. But Hannay grows increasingly suspicious — the man's eyes behind his thick spectacles never quite match his pleasant manner — and he eventually realises with horror that he is sitting across from one of the Black Stone's master agents. He escapes by blowing open a locked door with the dynamite he has been carrying.
Remote moorland inns and shepherds' cottages were familiar features of the South West Scottish landscape in Buchan's era, providing accommodation for drovers, gamekeepers, and travellers crossing the uplands. The landscape here is some of the most isolated in lowland Britain.
The fictional cottage is set in the bleak moors between Galloway and Ayrshire. Walkers on the Southern Upland Way pass through similar terrain, with stone cottages and remote farmsteads offering a vivid sense of the landscape Buchan evokes.
King Charles Street, Westminster — Hannay delivers Scudder's intelligence
Having decoded Scudder's notebook and survived his weeks on the run in Scotland, Hannay makes his way back to London and manages to get a meeting with Sir Walter Bullivant at the Foreign Office. It is here that Hannay delivers Scudder's intelligence about the Black Stone's plot — the planned assassination of the Greek statesman Karolides and the theft of naval mobilisation plans. Sir Walter is initially sceptical but is gradually persuaded, and Hannay is finally brought in from the cold as a valued ally rather than a murder suspect.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office on King Charles Street was designed by George Gilbert Scott and Matthew Digby Wyatt in a grand Italianate style, completed in 1868. It has been the heart of British diplomacy for over 150 years and represents the institutional weight of imperial power.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office building remains in active governmental use and is one of Whitehall's most magnificent Victorian structures. It is opened to the public during Open House London each September, when visitors can see its spectacular grand staircase and Durbar Court.
Visit: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (historic site)
Westminster, London — Hannay's return to London society
Once Hannay has been accepted by Sir Walter Bullivant and the intelligence establishment, he is installed in a respectable London hotel from which he can operate as an unofficial agent rather than a fugitive. From this base he begins to work with Sir Walter's colleagues to identify and neutralise the Black Stone agents before they can execute their plot. The contrast between the comfort of a London hotel and the weeks of heather-sleeping on the Scottish moors gives this section of the book a satisfying dramatic irony.
Westminster has been the centre of London's club and hotel culture since the Victorian era. St Ermin's Hotel, opened in 1899 near St James's Park, was a favourite of intelligence figures and politicians and has genuine connections to the world Buchan depicts.
St Ermin's Hotel remains open as a luxury hotel in Caxton Street, Westminster, and proudly acknowledges its historical connections to British intelligence. It is a short walk from both Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament.
Visit: St Ermin's Hotel (landmark)
North Kent or East Sussex coast — The thirty-nine steps and the final confrontation
The novel's climax takes place at a clifftop house on the Kent or Sussex coast, where the Black Stone agents are posing as respectable English gentlemen — and doing it convincingly enough to nearly fool Hannay entirely. It is only by a minute observation — the way one man taps his fingers in a coded rhythm — that Hannay realises he is facing the enemy in their most dangerous disguise. The thirty-nine steps of the title lead down the cliff face to a tidal cove where a boat waits to carry stolen naval secrets to Germany, and Hannay must act at once to stop them.
The chalk cliffs and tidal coves of the Kent coast between Broadstairs and Kingsgate are precisely the landscape Buchan describes. Stone Staircase steps cut into cliff faces were common features of Victorian coastal estates, allowing access to private beaches.
The Kingsgate and Broadstairs area of Thanet in Kent has long been associated with The Thirty-Nine Steps. A real set of steps at Kingsgate Bay near Broadstairs is traditionally identified with the novel's climax, and the area is a popular destination for literary tourists and coastal walkers.
Visit: Kingsgate Bay (landmark)
More by John Buchan: The 39 Steps locations map · All John Buchan books
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