Wigtown

And 25 years later, he's still there.

The bookshop in Wigtown is now Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop.

And Sean says he's handled over 3 million books in his 25 years at the helm.

And so the man who tried to avoid having one career has somehow ended up with two careers, although he does remain adamant that he's a bookseller who has written some books rather than a writer.

But here he is, Sean Bithell.

My name is Sean Bithell.

I have a secondhand bookshop in Wigtown, which is Scotland's national book town, and I've been doing it for 25 years.

Great to have you on, Sean.

By this time night had closed in save on a long, low, narrow slit in the westward.

Stumbling across the moor together, we made our way into the Wigtown Road, at the point where the high stone pillars marked the entrance to the Cloomber Avenue.

A tall dog-cart stood in front of the gateway, the horse browsing upon the thin border of grass which skirted the road.

"'It's all rich,' said Jameson, taking a close look at the deserted vehicle.

his own facetiousness the arrival of the new family at cloomber hall had no perceptible effect in relieving the monotony of our secluded district for instead of entering into such simple pleasures as the country had to offer or interest in themselves as we had hoped in our attempts to improve the lot of our poor crofters and fisher-folk they seemed to shun all observation and hardly ever to venture beyond the avenue gates we soon found too that the factor's words as to the enclosing of the grounds were founded upon fact for gangs of workmen were kept hard at work from early in the morning until late at night in erecting a high wooden fence round the whole estate When this was finished and topped with spikes, Cloomber Park became impregnable to anyone but an exceptionally daring climber.

It was as if the old soldier had been so imbued with military ideas that, like my Uncle Toby, he could not refrain even in times of peace from standing upon the defensive.

Stranger still, he had vigiled the house as if for a siege, for Begbie, the chief grocer of Wigtown, told me himself in a rapture of delight and amazement that the general had sent him an order for hundreds or dozens of every imaginable potted meat and vegetable it may be imagined that all these unusual incidents were not allowed to pass without malicious comment over the whole countryside and as far away as the english border there was nothing but gossip about the new tenants of clonber hall and the reasons which had led them to come among us the only hypothesis however which the bucolic mind could evolve was that which had already occurred to mr macneil the factor namely that the old general and his family were one and all afflicted with madness or as an alternative conclusion that he had committed some heinous offence and was endeavouring to escape the consequences of his misdeeds These were both natural suppositions under the circumstances, but neither of them appeared to me to commend itself as a true explanation of the facts.

It is true that General Heatherstone's behaviour on the occasion of our first interview was such as to suggest some suspicion of mental disease, but no man could have been more reasonable or more courteous than he had afterwards shown himself to be.

Hawthorne was by race of the clearest Puritan strain.

His earliest American ancestors, who wrote the name H-A-T-H-O-R-N-E the shape in which it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who inserted the W, was the younger son of a Wiltshire family whose residence, according to a note of our author's in 1837, was Wigcastle, Wigtown.

Hawthorne, in the note in question, mentions the gentleman who was at that time the head of the family, but it does not appear that he at any period renewed acquaintance with his English kinfolk.

Major William Hawthorne came out to Massachusetts in the early years of the Puritan settlement, in 1635 or 1636 more accurate.

And it's been officially designated as Scotland's National Book Town.

Now, Wigtown is about a two-hour drive away from Glasgow.

And you will find this place tucked away on foot.

high street it's called the open book and when you check into this place you get the keys not only to a very charming airbnb on the second floor you'll also get the keys to the first floor which is home to a second-hand bookshop and you will get to run this bookshop for a week or two open it daily you get to stock the shelves open the store at your preferred hours and set up your own window displays even chat and mingle with the locals who wander in to buy a book And this is what they call a bookshop holiday.

right here on Kiss Cafe with your Travel Thursday.

It's Charmaine Pouin with you.

And we're talking about this bookstore holiday experience that you could enjoy in Wigtown, Scotland's officially recognized national book town, just about two hours away from Glasgow.

Now, what's really special about it, aside from you living above the bookstore in an Airbnb apartment for a minimum of six nights and basically running the store daily when you stay there? What's special is the community.

Yes, we do.

In Wigtown, right? Sorry, at Newton Stewart, which is at the Galloway Distillery, which is Sam Heughan's Galloway Distillery.

Newton Stewart, yes.

And so we are going next Friday.

The Galloway conversation is taking place on Saturday the 19th of September so that's probably about four days from when the podcast comes out and the Chadfolk session is on the Sunday the 20th of September and that's at the Smiddy in Balmaclellan so that might be nice um Just before we go, though, I'd like to point out that I did leave something fairly major out of my cultural gleanings in September, obviously, beginning September the, let me check, 25th.

It's the Wigtown Book Festival.

There's always lots of great events at the Wigtown Book Festival.

There's essentially two festivals going on at once because there's an adult festival, but there's also a children's literature festival.

And you'll see Big Wig, who's the mascot for the children's festival, going around and about and doing all kinds of things around Wigtown at that time.

Definitely one to try and get along to.

It's usually pretty sold out though by this point in the year so but worth having a look at.

Everything's homogenised

The atmosphere grew darker than ever before.

The stories that have echoed through Scottish history, the deaths of John Brown of Priesthill, the Wigtown Martyrs and the ministry of James Rennick, all belong to this final and tragic chapter.

And that is where our story now turns.

By 1684, the government's campaign against the radical Covenanters had reached its most intense stage.

the waterfowl could have a better chance because they grow so much quicker um and you know some of the tree bantams uh particularly again females um but it is interesting that certain breeds kind of cropped up like in modern modern game cropped up quite a lot yeah rosecombs cropped up quite a lot cool ducks cropped up quite a lot and i don't know if that's partly the rosecombs i actually genuinely put down to james warsley and the fact that he's yeah he's flooded social media with Rose games for the past.

Well, I actually showed them up in Scotland is Wigtown.

Oh yeah.

And