Wigtown Book Festival to get a taste of life in Antarctic

The immersive experience featuring a replica Antarctic refuge hut uses storytelling, soundscapes, poetry and archive video to transport the audience back in time, and across thousands of miles, to a tiny ring of rock, which is part of an active volcano, set in the vast Southern Ocean.

The Deception Island multi-sensory artwork is a collaborative work based on a poem by Elizabeth Lewis Williams, whose father George Lewis, was based there between 1959 and 1964.

Organisers said: "It is not only a remarkable experience, but offers valuable insights into a place that has witnessed humanity at its best and worst."

Scottish Festivals PR (Image: Scottish Festivals PR)

Initially used as a base for the ships that drove whales to the edge of extinction, the island with its safe harbour was also used by seal hunters, with similarly catastrophic results.

And yet it has also been a place where scientists have endured some of the toughest conditions on Earth, with only the most basic of comforts, to carry out vital research which has benefited all of humanity. Mr Lewis was one of the people whose work led to the discovery that manmade chemicals were destroying the ozone layer that protects the world from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation.

Ms Williams said: “Deception Island is a way of ‘transporting’ people somewhere utterly remote, frozen and fascinating and giving them a sense of what it was like, and the importance of shelter for human beings in such an extreme environment.

“When you step inside the hut, it is a step back in time. It is set out as it would have been in the 1950s, with wooden bunk beds, a tiny camp kitchen, Tilley lamps and photos from Deception Island. The world outside disappears.

Scottish Festivals PR (Image: Scottish Festivals PR)

“It is a portal to a time and place that, when the last ship left for winter, you were cut off for months – no fresh food, no letters, no phone calls, just occasional brief radio messages.

“As few as five men would be sharing a very confined area, for long periods of time – they really had to learn to get along.

“And the yearning for the light was enormous. At the end of winter one of the men went out and climbed a mountain just to see the first rays of the returning sun come above the horizon.”

The project developed from a poem Ms Williams wrote, also called Deception Island, responding to an unpublished book she found after her father’s death about his experiences in the Antarctic.

Brought up in Shetland for most of her life until the age of 18, Ms Williams and her family moved to Peebles in 1979 and then went to England. During her childhood on Shetland she remembers that the Antarctic remained a big influence on her father.

She said: “He felt quite profoundly about it. It certainly shaped the way he brought us up. In our early years we were taught to carry our own provisions and rucksacks – to be self-reliant. He also renovated a croft, very much in the manner of the Antarctic field stations.

“Deception Island was a place where you saw the best and worst of humanity. There was all the evidence of the industrial whaling which nearly stripped the world of its whales. But then you had the scientists there. “Here was a place my father saw as being a challenging environment, and a difficult workplace, but with utopian potential – run under the Antarctic Treaty system that saw people put aside international disagreements and work together for the greater good.”

Adam Barnes (Image: Adam Barnes)

This year’s festival which launches on September 23 and runs till October 2 is supported by EventScotland as part of Scotland’s Year of Stories 2022.

Visitors are being invited from all over the country and beyond as the event continues to rebuild after the impact of the Covid pandemic.

Writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry across numerous genres will be in attendance including Outlander actor Graham McTavish and Scottish author Chris Brookmyre.

Sports commentator Andrew Cotter, known for talking about his beloved labradors Olive and Mabel, will also attend the festival.

Wigtown Book Festival celebrates Galloway and the town’s own bestselling author, and owner of Scotland’s largest second-hand book shop Shaun Bythell, will talk about his latest work Remainders of the Day.

One special event, specifically created as part of Scotland’s Year of Stories 2022, will be The Bookshop Untold – a storytelling performance set in an enchanted bookshop aimed at those aged 12 and up – which will take audiences on a journey through history, Scottish literature, art, love, and loss.

Nature, natural history and human relationships with environment will be a significant theme throughout the festival.

Perthshire-based conservationist and naturalist Polly Pullar will talk about her latest book The Horizontal Oak, while Edinburgh research explorer Steve Brusatte will discuss The Rise and Reign of the Mammals.

Also among the guests will be Romain Pizzi, an Edinburgh-based wildlife vet who has performed brain surgery on a bear and endoscopies on sharks.

Braveheart actress Gerda Stevenson and Deacon Blue frontman Ricky Ross will also make an appearance.

People will also be able to enjoy other events including a literary walk in the Galloway countryside as well as fireworks and a pipe band on opening night.