Booked up ... the regenerated Wigtown
I've just come back from the lovely Galloway town of Wigtown, remote and beautiful. It's Scotland's official "book town" - and the annual literary festival there has been driving the regeneration of a place that a decade ago was run down, underpopulated and dealing with a serious unemployment problem. Now it has a busy, thriving air, with several rather fabulous secondhand bookshops. Not quite Hay-on-Wye, but getting there.
Ian Paisley, rather astonishingly, was the keynote speaker. Sadly, I didn't hear his fire-and-sulphur speech: apparently it was really quite something. He emphasised the links between Scotland and Ireland, via the Wigtown martyrs of 1685 - a pair of Protestant women, aged 63 and 18, who were lashed to stakes in Wigtown Bay until the waters rose and drowned them. Cheerful tale. He then switched down about 50 gears to moan about the state of the roads in Northern Ireland.
The festival has a great feel to it: friendly, intimate, and very much integrated into the town, with events taking place in bookshops, in the County Buildings, and in the local distillery (the southernmost in Scotland). The Silent Movie Bus, a wonderful 1920s mobile cinema, was showing Jacques Tati films on the high street while the local lads hung about outside eating popcorn. My favourite event, however, was a project called The Real Bride of Lammermoor. Taking Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor - itself an adaptation of a Walter Scott novel - singers from Scottish Opera and a narrator revealed the true story of Janet Dalrymple, the 17th-century woman on whom the novel is based. Janet had been engaged to her beloved Archibald Rutherford, but was forced by her family into a political marriage to David Dunbar, heir to Baldoon. On the wedding night Dunbar was found stabbed in the marital bedroom; Janet was cowering in a corner, her mind gone. Dunbar survived and Janet was taken back to Baldoon - but a month later she died.
The performance was set in the ruined castle of Baldoon, which Janet is said to haunt, a mile or so outside of Wigtown. The whole thing had a slightly homemade air about it (the sound man played his own records of Beatles numbers arranged for Wurlitzer as the crowd gathered, and the stage was the side of a truck decorated with bits of tartan) but it was utterly charming - and haunting - as the sun set and the gulls wheeled above.
The festival continues this weekend, with Tobias Jones talking about his search for Utopia; Louis de Paor and Aonghas MacNeacail talking about poetry in Irish and Scots Gaelic; and John Calder introducing a reading of Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal. Surely the highlight, however, is going to be Sunday morning's football match: Festival FC vs Wigtown and Bladnoch XI. Will the literary flâneurs be trounced by the home side? Be there.
