After leaving the Galloway Forest Park we still had plenty of time to spare so we decided to take the scenic route to Portpatrick, via Wigtown. Wigtown is known as Scotland’s Book town, which after spending a couple of hours there, I have decided actually means the world’s biggest book exchange!
Apart from a grocery store, a post office and the odd pub, every shop in Wigtown is a book shop! It’s unbelievable. The Wigtown Fesitval is also happening at the moment, so the park in the centre of the High Street has been converted to a sea of marquees, with coachload after coachload of pensioners visiting.
We chose to bypass the festival and head for the harbour. Wigtown is made up of a mixture of old and new housing, with some of the older homes having excellent views over Wigtown Bay. We finally reached the harbour and were surprised to find it looked more like something built in the iron age than a functioning harbour. There wasn’t a boat in sight, and the tide was out so there wasn’t much water either! It turns out the harbour was built recently by a group of people on the Scottish equivalent of the Work for the Dole scheme.
From the harbour there is a trail to the nature reserve, where thousands of birds can be found (apparently). Recent rains made the way muddy, but we continued on. We didn’t see many birds, other than some Herring Gulls, but we did see the most odd, bright orange slug which appeared to have been deposited on the path by an earlier high tide. I’ve never seen anything like it before!
With nothing of interest at the harbour, we turned around and made our way back to the town centre. There wasn’t much happening there either, so we popped into the Co-Op and bought some sandwiches before hitting the road again to find somewhere for lunch.
Wigtown was nice, but nothing special.
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