New Statesman Scotland - Whisky and writers in Wigtown
At the opening reading of the recent, and very successful, first Scottish Book Town Festival, held in Bladnoch Distillery within staggering distance of Wigtown, Alastair Reid recalled his astonishment at hearing, in 1997, that the Galloway town had been designated Scotland's lnternational Book Town. "As a child," he remarked, "I can't remember ever seeing one book in Wigtown!" Now, though, one of the boasts of the Book Shop in Wigtown is that it can provide 85 different books for each of the town's one thousand inhabitants.
Reid was not the only person to be initially sceptical about Wigtown's new status. Visiting journalists saw drabness, dilapidation; wrote as if all that was lacking was tumbleweed rolling down the street. Their good wishes were freighted with heavy reservations. The project is now in the hands of Ian Barr, on a three-year contract as Book Town development officer. While he recognises the scale of the challenge, he shows an undimmable enthusiasm and commitment to making the Book Town a success. Wigtown is already home to 16 of 40 projected book-related businesses; and Ian is quick to point out that the Hay-on-Wye festival, established in 1961, took 20 years to build up the reputation it currently enjoys.
Certainly there are bigger literary festivals, but I wonder if there are any more convivial. At the end of Friday's reading, various writers, performers and friends took refuge in a back room from the Picts' thunderously effective ceilidh music. Raymond Armstrong, the genial owner of the distillery, produced bottles of whisky from Bladnoch and Connemara, whose descriptors said "Try me" and "Try me again". He wondered to Reid how he could have faced such an itinerant life. He himself had moved only from Belfast to Wigtown, and the move, he claimed, had near killed him.
The next morning, after the torrential rain of the previous day, Wigtown lay open in the sunshine. A royal burgh by the mid-13th century, it boasts the widest street in Scotland. The fuchsia hedges in the central garden were in bloom, as were the hanging baskets of petunias; one building had just been painted a spring-like green. As I sat with my family at a pavement cafe, cars filled the centre of the town.
"Yes, it's worked this time," said Angela Everitt of Readinglasses, the eclectic feminist bookshop, and in John Carter's cavernous Book Shop there was a similar story: "Busy, busy, busy." The previous day they had had a busload of Koreans. John Carter pointed out the benefits to Wigtown of Book Town status.
"Look out the door at the infrastructure. All these buildings are either done up or in the process of it."
One building that is still in serious need of attention, though, is the one that could be the jewel in Wigtown's crown - the grand old county building. It still has a slightly abandoned, hollow feeling to it. Not, however, for Mairi Hedderwick's Katie Morag audience, who had to be shoe-horned in.
"Enthusiasm is such a rare quality, we should bottle it," Reid commented as we chatted about the confluence of optimism we had witnessed. And indeed, the Scottish Parliament, in a debate on 15 September, gave its enthusiastic official approval to Wigtown as Scotland's International Book Town; the first of the book towns to be recognised in such a way. True, the MSPs commented that access roads need upgrading to further entice visitors. To many, perhaps, Wigtown still feels out of the way, out of the "mainstream".
However, there was a feeling over the weekend that Wigtown does not regard itself as such. Energy and new pride flourish within it. As I attended the packed launch of Gargoyles and Ice Cream, the festival book produced by local children with Mairi Hedderwick working as "assistant editor", I began to appreciate what special childhoods this generation of children in the Machars will have. They will grow up in a place surrounded by books, visited by writers - writers for themselves and for their adult selves. For the vision of those involved is that the Book Town will not work if it is seen as something alien, imposed by outside agencies. The grain of the word must spread naturally - "without pretension", as the festival brochure put it - throughout the area, and beyond.
Speaking of grain, Bladnoch, Scotland's most southerly distillery, established in 1817, goes into production again this year. By the time we taste its first malt in roughly eight years, no one should need to ask where Wigtown is.
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