Wigtown Festival May 2004
Wigtown, a little county town in the south-west of Scotland, has successfully reinvented itself after many years in the economic doldrums, as Scotland's National Book Town. JOHN HUDSON writes.
The weather blessed the event. Book dealers from all over Britain and Europe converged on Wigtown, local art, craft and produce was on sale amid festivities including traditional music.
Wigtown, a little county town in the south-west of Scotland, has successfully reinvented itself after many years in the economic doldrums, as Scotland's National Book Town. Twenty or so bookshops now pepper the town centre and the immediate environs. 
The region of Dumfries and Galloway stretches from the river Esk in the east to Loch Ryan and the Rhinns of Galloway in the west. On its northern border rise the Southern Uplands, a natural barrier and the former refuge of fleeing Covenanters. To the south is the Solway, until the twentieth century the main thoroughfare into and out of Galloway. One could also define Dumfries and Galloway in terms of a topography of literary creativity.
In the east, lies the huge figure of Hugh MacDiarmid, born and buried among the hills above Langholm; to the West the Rhinns of Galloway is the James Barke's 'Land of the Leal'. Spanning north, south, east and west is the figure of Robert Burns, born in Ayrshire, buried in Dumfries, a farmer in Ellisland and an exciseman riding the coast from Gretna to Newton Stewart. There is scarely a public house in Galloway that cannot lay claim to some Burns legend or poem.
Robert Burns celebrated the rivers that define the area. But his is a broad sweep. For local detail, perhaps the greatest poem by a native of Galloway is 'The Brownie of Blednoch' by William Nicholson (1783 to1847). Blednoch, now Bladnoch, adjacent to Wigtown and home to Scotland's southernmost distillery, was the setting one of Scotland's greatest folk creations, Aiken-drum, the Brownie of Blednoch. The creature is outlawed as a consequence of his strangeness, despite his goodwill.
Though the Brownie of Blednoch lang be gane,
The mark o his feet's on mony a stane;
And mony a wife and mony a wean
Tell the feats o Aiken-drum . . .
And guidly folks hae gotten a fright,
When the moon was set, and the stars gied nae light,
At the roaring linn in the howe o the night
Wi sughs like Aiken-drum.
Recent research in the library of Broughton House, the former home of artist E. A. Hornel, and now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, has brought to light previously unknown manuscripts of Nicholson's work relating to Wigtown.
Local literary traditions go back a long way. The Scots language of Galloway, coloured by Brithonic (Ecclefechan, Thomas Carlisle's birthplace, means little church) is linked to Northumbrian. Perhaps the most famous 'installation poem' of all exists in Ruthwell, near Dumfries: a fragment of 'The Dream of the Rood', one of the finest early religious poems, can be seen on an eighth-century cross in the area. A few miles from Wigtown is Whithorn, where St Ninian introduced Christianity to Scotland; at Candida Casa his successors copied manuscripts, and from there took the Word abroad; Sir Patrick Hannay, poet and denizen of the royal court in the seventeenth century came from Sorbie.
Later local literary figures include Thomas Carlisle, born in Ecclefechan; essayist and historian George Murray; Kailyard novelist S.R. Crockett; and Samuel Wilson a grocer in Crossmichael who wrote in Scots, English and Gaelic - a precursor of a contemporary figure in Scottish literature, also from Crossmichael and master of three tongues, William Neill. Other contemporary writers include Alistair Reid, famous for his work with the New Yorker, Tom Pow and Hugh McMillan, while writers groups flourish across the whole region.
Copyright John Hudson 2005.