shewhomust | Retail therapy

The most obvious route from Isle of Whithorn to Kirkcudbright runs through Wigtown, which is Scotland's book town: of course we sopped there. We had actually planned a couple of nights in Wigtown, but been forced by circumstances into something that worked even better. We did not go into every bookshop in town, but we spent a happy day walking up one side of Main Street and down the other, and came away with as much as we could comfortably carry...

Here's

durham_rambler, ready to start:

That's The Bookshop, as featured in Shaun Bythell's Diary of a Bookseller and other books. It claims to be Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop; it's certainly larger on the inside.

durham_rambler found the crime fiction department:

While I found, among other things, a booklet of drawings of the buildings of Wigtownshire, which I had been browsing in the local history display in the church at Isle of Whithorn. A few doors along the street, the specialist children's bookshop provided a small stack of Abbey School books.

There are secrets behind the frontages along Main Street: we followed the sign to Byre down a lane into a garden, and then through a tunnel of greenery:

to the hidden bookshop:

From green to red. This is the Post Office:

The books depicted in the junction box are all local, of course.

By the time we were back to the County Buildings, it was starting to rain. We took shelter in the Old Bank Bookshop, where

durham_rambler was surprided to discover a thirty year old book about Westminster scandals written by someone we know through local politics - and did not know they'd written a book. One last picture, not a bookshop this time:

I liked the contrast of the rather drab frontage, and the brightly coloured scarecrow (there were several scarecrows around the town) doing - what, exactly? Escaping down a slide?

And that was Wigtown.