Wigtown is a town and former royal burgh in Wigtownshire, of which it is the county town, within the Dumfries and Galloway region in Scotland. It lies east of Stranraer and south of Newton Stewart. It is well known today as "Scotland's National Book Town" with a high concentration of second-hand book shops. It has a population of about 1,000.Wigtown is the gateway to and main centre of the Machars peninsula.Due to the North Atlantic Drift the climate is mild and plants normally associated with the warmer climates of lower latitudes can successfully be grown here.Scotland's National Book TownToday Wigtown is known as Scotland's "book town" and is thus compared to Hay-on-Wye in Wales. However, in contrast to Hay-on-Wye, Wigtown's status as a book town was planned, in order to regenerate a very depressed town (the main employers, the creamery and distillery, having closed in the 1990s), although the distillery (Bladnoch) has now re-opened and is distilling its own malt whisky. There was a national search in Scotland for a candidate town.The townOne 18th-century historian of the county, Samuel Robinson, noted that "the greatest number of houses were of a homely character, thatched and one storey high". Each house, he continued, had a midden in front of it. Bishop Pococke in 1760 also noted the existence of thatched houses. By the end of the 19th century it was said that two houses in the town were hardly the same; some had gable ends, others had large fronts pierced by pigeon-hole windows, while still others had outside stairs. Wigtown was described as the quaintest county town in Scotland.
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