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Wigton is a small market town some eleven miles south west of Carlisle, and possibly one of the most pleasing towns in Cumbria.
For centuries this bustling little town has been the centre of business and social life on the Cumbrian Plain. It has had a Royal Market Charter since 1262, and the market is still held on Tuesday too, although now it is a tame affair compared to the days when pigs and poultry were sold live in the High Street, and there was bull-baiting by the Market cross (now the site of the fountain). All commodities brought to the market were assigned a special part of the town. See the letters O.B.W....oats, barley, and wheat..marked out in white cobble-stones in front of the church.
At that time the town was only four adjacent hamlets. The two main thoroughfares, King Street and High Street, were built in the latter half of the 1700s when the town was entering a period of prosperity mainly owing to the manufacture of cotton and linen, also dyeing, printing, tanning, and other things using water from the stream which flows round the east side of the town. The weaving was a home industry and weavers cottages can be seen at Tenters in what used to be the working part of Wigton.
One name that is strongly linked to the town is George moore...(Samuel Smiles wrote a biography about him). He apparently made a fortune in London..after a childhood in Wigton. Part of his Whitehall mansion remains at Mealsgate. He died in the 1870s after being hit by a cart in Carlisle. His fortune gave a lot of help to the poor of the district in their education, together with many other good causes. The fountain at the junction of the two main roads in town is actually in memory of the wife he fell in love with when he was a poor ambitious apprentice of nineteen, newly come to London from Wigton, seeking his fortune, and she Eliza Flint Ray, his master's daughter, was a child of ten. This fountain is possibly the most attractive item in town with its gilded floriate panels against crimson Shap granite, and with a golden cross surmounting the whole.
The church is a plain building refashioned in the 18th century, but it stands on a more ancient site. There are streets all round but the churchyard has been made into a pleasant garden. The spacious carpeted interior has galleries on three sides supported on columns and an unusual colour scheme in grey relieved here and there by gold including even the pews. The high ceiling painted Arabian blue has decorative roundels with an oval centre in white and gold.
In 1653 George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, visited the town. Other visitors were John Wesley, who preached on Market Hill in 1759, and Charles Dickens who stayed at the Kings Arms Hotel when he and Wilkie Collins were on their 'Lazy Tour of two Idle Apprentices'.
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