Run Britain day 99: From Wigtown to Whithorn

Today was everything I wanted Run Britain to be (not the running bit, the running was ok). What was fantastic was Wigtown.

Wigtown prides itself on being the national book town of Scotland. This is a title it gave itself after the town fell into tough economic times and decided it needed a ‘thing’ to give it a boost.

Like Hay-on-Wye in Wales, it hosts an annual book festival, which sees book lovers flock from miles around. Its high street has more book shops than I have ever seen, including the (again self-proclaimed) ‘largest bookshop in Scotland’.

Kat and I are both book lovers so we had to go in. And I am so glad we did. It’s an Aladin’s cave of book magic, with an estimated 100,000 books (most of them second hand) lining its hundreds of higeldy-pigeldy shelves.

The shopkeeper was just as interested in what I was doing as I was in this magical shop. We swapped stories for a long time before I decided that my Mars Bar was probably long overdue and we left. I could have stayed in there for hours.

As we left, she handed me a book, written by the shop’s owner about the trials and tribulations of running a bookshop. It’s a fantastic memoir, which speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit of the people of Wigtown, who have rescued their town from economic distress with a bit of creativity.