Small Scottish town revived
by the old fashioned book
 WIGTOWN martyr’s stake where local lore holds that in the 17th Century two female Scottish Covenanters, Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLauchlan, were tied to stakes here and left to drown in the encroaching tide.
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By HARRY McGRATH
Scotland is supposed to be losing its sheep. The transfer of European farming subsidies from live stock to food growing has meant that Scottish sheep have been disappearing from its hills and glens.
The word hasn’t reached the south-west corner of the country, however. Here the fields are still teaming with lambs and their protective mothers. As I watch, one ewe places herself between her lamb and an aggressive raven.
It’s spring, though a late one. The roads are lined with half-formed cherry blossoms and the temperature is struggling to rise above a single figure.
I’m in the small community of Wigtown to give a lecture as part of a Spring Book Weekend and take the opportunity to study one of Scotland’s most interesting if neglected areas.
Wigtown became a royal burgh in 1469 but there was a settlement here for centuries before that. The ancient history of the area is represented by chambered cairns, medieval castles and churches, and standing stones.
At the neighbouring town of Whithorn, Saint Ninian formed Scotland’s earliest Christian community in the 4th Century.
A rather different religious episode is associated with Wigtown. In the 17th Century two female Scottish Covenanters, Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLauchlan, were tied to stakes here and left to drown in the encroaching tide, or so it has been commonly believed.
Recently some historians have questioned whether the incident actually happened, but the locals tenaciously defend the truth of it and visitors come here to view the martyr’s stake and grave sites.
Fascinating though it is, the story of the Wigtown martyrs was not enough to sustain a small town that had lost almost all its traditional industry. Wigtown was badly in need of a remake and in 1998 it followed the example of Hay on Wye in Wales and acquired “book town” status.
The International Organisation of Book Towns defines a book town as “a small rural town or village in which secondhand and antiquarian books shops are concentrated.”
Wigtown has taken this definition to heart and now hosts 20 bookshops and an annual writer’s festival which has seen the likes of Louis de Bernieres and Scotland’s only Booker Prize winner James Kelman give readings here.
Russian writer Vitali Vitaliev described the transformation that was wrought in Wigtown by the book town initiative.
One local told him that before 1998, “houses were falling apart and trees grew on chimneys.” After that, properties were snapped up and the town even had its first cash dispenser installed.
It is a testimony, says Vitaliev, to the power of the old book which is able to change whole communities, “even in our button-pressing (as opposed to page-turning) epoch of digital television and the Internet”.
My own talk is in the Old Bank Bookshop which is as its name suggests. Inevitably the presentation concerned connections between Scotland and Canada though it was remarkable for taking place in a part of Scotland where such connections are especially rich and long-standing.
In 1622, a ship left nearby Kirkcudbright bound for what became Nova Scotia on the first of several missions to introduce Scottish settlement and create a New Scotland to match New England. The original plan was to call Cape Breton “New Galloway” after the area from which the ship set sail.
Wigtown and surrounding areas were later affected by the so called Lowland Clearances, a phenomenon only recently subject to serious investigation by Scottish historians despite it having predated the better known Highland Clearances.
Changes in tenancy rules forced people from the land and many left for Canada as a result. They took local surnames with them (like Hannay) and, it is said, that some also transported the seeds of the rowan tree so that a Scottish home in Canada could be identified by the fact that it had a rowan tree beside it.
Lunch is served at “The Bookshop” which was the only bookshop in Wigtown before 1998 and is the largest secondhand bookshop in Scotland. With a mile of shelving and over 65,000 books, it is a paradise for the bibliophile.
Rather remarkably it is owned by a young man with long hair who has placed a lot of faith in the future of the book at a time when so many are saying that it has none. Like most people I meet in Wigtown, he has moved into the area replacing so many that, through the centuries, have moved out of it.
From the window, I can see people coursing from bookshop to bookshop, café to café and pub to pub. A mile down the road Scotland’s most southerly distillery re-opened on the banks of the Bladnoch River in 2000.
There’s been a distillery there since 1817 but it was subject to repeated closures. Now it and everything else around Wigtown seems to be caught up in a general wave of optimism which is gamely battling the spirit of the times.
The fact that so much of it is based on the humble book seems like a good enough reason for a celebratory dram which is to be taken over there by that sheep field.
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