Sure, ticket sales were up 50 per cent on last year, and its commercial vitality was immediately obvious. But it's in the unquantifiable memories it leaves behind that Wigtown really scores.
The festival's final Saturday may have been cursed by th
e bad weather that has blighted all this year's tented book festivals, but before then there were heaps of highlights. Chief among them, by common consent, was the event in which Sara Maitland talked about her new book on silence in the stillness of 12th-century Cruggleton Church, nestling in a walled copse in the middle of a (then) unharvested field.
Inside the church, which has no electricity and only a small amount of natural light from the Norman slit windows, scores of tea-lights flickered. In the rafters, a bird fluttered about, like the sparrow in the feasting hall Bede used as simile for human life back in the eighth century. In the 21st, an audience of 100 listened, until the final applause, in appreciative silence.
TREES OF KNOWLEDGETHE other Wigtown highlights aren't always the obvious ones, like Michael Morpurgo (who signed for 50 minutes after his event). Just one final example: In Linda Cracknell's talk about wilderness walks, a man in the audience spoke of how much he loves walking on the local disused railway tracks. They're so long gone, he said, that the only signs of their existence are apple trees that have grown up from the apple cores thrown out of carriage windows long ago. Which strikes me as not only a piece of good observation but a half-decent metaphor for book festivals themselves.
HEARING IS BELIEVINGBY WAY of contrast to Maitland's meditation on silence, next Saturday poetry lovers are invited to join in the "Two Minutes' Pandemonium" free events at the Scottish Poetry Library. It's not as manic as it sounds – but is a chance to hear some of the library's audio collection, and not two minutes either, but spread over five hours from 1-6pm. "We'll be plundering our awesome audio collection, winding up the gramophone and swaying to some good tunes," says SPL communications queen, Peggy Hughes.
The full article contains 407 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
