In the abbey habit Dumfries and Galloway

Galloway impaled on the Orle of Balliol. Thus are commemorated the founders of the college, John Balliol, father of the hapless ''Toom Tabard'', King of Scots, and his wife, Devorgilla who was the daughter of the last of the kings of Galloway.

Balliol College began life as a hostel for impoverished students, Balliol's penance for insulting one of the Prince Bishops of Durham. When he died, Devorgilla devoted the rest of her life to the memory of her husband. She gave Balliol College its charter and, close to the Solway Firth in a tranquil

valley overshadowed by the granite mountain, Criffel, she founded a great abbey. At her own death her body and her husband's embalmed heart were laid to rest together at the high altar. In Devorgilla's honour the Cistercian monks named the abbey Dulce Cor, Sweetheart Abbey.

As Scottish abbeys go, Sweetheart Abbey is in a good state of preservation. The first abbot saved it from the Hammer of the Scots by paying homage to Edward I at Berwick-on-Tweed. The last one, Gilbert Broun, fought hard for the abbey against the Reformers. He was still there in 1608 when his chamber was broken into on the orders of the Archbishop of Glasgow and a bonfire was made of ''Popish trash'' in the High Street of Dumfries.

When the monks left, the buildings were ''looted'' for stone to such an extent that local gentlemen undertook to protect them - early Friends of the Abbey, if you like. Today Sweetheart Abbey, is one of three in Dumfries and Galloway in the care of Historic Scotland.

For 600 years after its foundation, Sweetheart Abbey was also known as New Abbey. In the village of New Abbey nearby, the water-powered Corn Mill is still called Monks' Mill, though it is probably only the lade and the mill pond that survive from monastic days. The mill, incorporating a house for the miller, was built on the site of an earlier one at the end of the eighteenth century. After the last miller moved out in the 1940s, the mill stood silent and empty until Charles Stewart of Shambellie House, started restoration, eventually entrusting it to State care.

It is also thanks to Stewart that the largest collection of period costume ever to be donated to the National Museums of Scotland can be seen in Shambellie House, his former home.

Stewart was born in the Philippines where his father was a partner in the merchant firm of Smith, Bell and Company, a casualty of the 1930s Depression. Back in Scotland, the family inherited Shambellie, one of David Bryce's more modest architectural commissions. Stewart began collecting costumes as a young man, to copy in his work as a book illustrator. Dealers had little interest then, and period dresses were being bought by housewives to re-emerge as curtains and cushion covers.

Shambellie is an an outstation of the National Museums of Scotland with furniture from their own collections and from a bequest by the Misses Aikman-Smith of Argrennan House, Kirkcudbright.

In the dining room, supper is being served during a country house ball about 1910. The gentlemen are resplendent in evening wear and one lady is wearing a cream silk dress originally worn by Miss Florence Robinson, the daughter of the South African diamond millionaire.

In one of the bedrooms the costumed figures of a lady and a servant appear to be choosing items of cruisewear, 1930s vintage. We can see the servant is the lady's maid. She doesn't wear uniform but her dress is dowdy compared with her mistress's outfit.

Lily, an artist's lay-figure from the Victorian era restored by Stewart, lives in an upstairs room. Few lay-figures survive.They worked hard as models while the painter was drawing the sitter's clothes. In the same room hangs a watercolour of another of Stewart's lay-figures. On loan to Pietro Annigoni, she is standing in for the Queen, wearing Her Majesty's Garter robes.

Another queen, another abbey. In 1563 Mary Queen of Scots set out through what is now Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway, combining a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Ninian with a sort of public relations exercise. The Queen took her time, staying overnight and supping with noble families, testing their loyalty. Along the route supporters and their retainers joined the procession and a huge company of horsemen was in attendance by the time she arrived at Glenluce Abbey, Vallis Lucis, a few miles from Whithorn. The abbey had escaped the attentions of the Reformers, the monks having decided to embrace the new faith. They were accustomed to dispensing hospitality and had learned to expect little in return from the pilgrims who sought bed and board and held on to Scots pounds for a donation to the saint.

In later centuries Glenluce Abbey was heavily quarried for building stone, but the Chapter House remains intact, re-built in the fifteenth century, by which time the monks had abandoned much of the austerity practised by the early Cistercians.

Most of the noblemen who had ben with Mary at Glenluce Abbey returned to fight for her at the battle of Langside. Six lords fled with her from the field. Day and night they galloped with the fugitive queen until they reached the safety of the wilds of Galloway where they advised her to go into hiding until support rallied for her again. But she would have none of it.

A fisherman was found who would take her to England and she sought shelter at Dundrennan Abbey by the Solway, an austere early Cistercian foundation, the mother abbey of the other two.

It may be no more than a local legend, but the story persists - lonely and frightened of the night to come, Mary, Queen of Scots, asked a young peasant woman to bring to the royal bedchamber her little son, almost two years of age, like her own son, already a crowned king. If the story is true then she slept her last night on Scottish soil with a stranger's child clasped in her arms. Poor Mary.

n Explorer tickets giving unlimited access to Historic Scotland sites can be bought at staffed properties and at Tourist

Information Centres. A seven-day family ticket costs #26.50. Dumfries and Galloway Tourist Information Centre: 01387 253862. Shambellie House, seven miles south of Dumfries: 01387 850461.