Wigtown is the rainy-day trip for readers, and one of the better ones in Britain. A broad Georgian square is ringed by more than a dozen second-hand and specialist bookshops — including Scotland's largest — along with cafés and a small distillery. It was designated Scotland's National Book Town in 1998, a deliberate act of reinvention for a town that had lost its creamery and its distillery, and it worked.
The bookshops are genuinely different from one another: general second-hand, children's, crime, poetry, antiquarian, and at least one where you can rent the shop and run it yourself for a week. Allow considerably longer than you think.
The Book Festival
The Wigtown Book Festival runs for ten days from late September into October and draws serious names for a town of nine hundred people. Accommodation across the whole area fills for it, so book early or stay in Girvan and drive.
Below the town
Two things at the bottom of the hill, and they could not be less alike.
The saltmarsh — Wigtown Bay is a local nature reserve, one of the largest in Britain, with a bird hide and a boardwalk out onto the merse. Waders, wildfowl and geese in winter, and a good place for an hour with binoculars. See wildlife.
The Martyrs' Stake. In 1685, during the Killing Times, two Covenanting women — Margaret Wilson, aged eighteen, and Margaret McLachlan, in her sixties — were tied to stakes in the tidal channel and drowned by the incoming sea for refusing to swear the oath of supremacy. A memorial marks the spot, reached across the merse, and there is a monument on the hill above. Historians have argued about the details for three centuries; the memorial is sobering regardless.
Getting there and combining it
About an hour from Girvan, via the A714 and Newton Stewart, which is seven miles north. The natural pairing is with the forest park — hills in the morning, bookshops in the afternoon, or the reverse if the cloud is down. See the Galloway forest loop.
Beyond Wigtown the Machars peninsula runs south to Whithorn, the cradle of Scottish Christianity, and the Isle of Whithorn.
It is the best wet-weather destination within an hour of Girvan — see Girvan on a rainy day.
