Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Burns Monument and Brig o' Doon
Heading through the carefully manicured garden behind the museum, you can't miss the
Burns Monument , a striking, slightly ludicrous Neoclassical rotunda, topped by a
scalloped cornice and a miniature copper-gilt baldachin. Despite currently being
enveloped in scaffolding pending renovation, you can climb to the top for views over to
the Brig o' Doon , the picturesque thirteenth-century hump-backed bridge over which Tam
is forced to flee for his life. In the nearby Statue House , admire some eighteenth-century
stone statues of Tam, Soutar and Nanse, which are, in fact, portraits of Burns's friends.
Alloway Kirk
Across the road from the museum is the plain, roofless ruin of the sixteenth-century
Alloway Kirk , setting for much of Tam o' Shanter ; Tam, having got drunk in Ayr, passes
ROBERT BURNS
The first of seven children, Robert Burns , the national poet of Scotland, was born in Alloway
on January 25, 1759. His father, William, was a tenant farmer at Mount Oliphant, near Alloway,
moving to Lochlie Farm, Tarbolton, eleven years later. A series of bad harvests and the
demands of the landlord's estate manager bankrupted the family, and William died almost
penniless in 1784. These events had a profound effect on Robert, leaving him with an
antipathy towards political authority and a hatred of the land-owning classes.
With the death of his father, Robert became head of the family and they moved again, this
time to a farm at Mossgiel, near Mauchline. Burns had already begun writing poetry and
prose at Lochlie, recording incidental thoughts in his First Commonplace Book , but it was here
at Mossgiel that he began to write in earnest, and his first volume, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish
Dialect , was published in Kilmarnock in 1786. The topics proved immensely popular, celebrated
by ordinary Scots and Edinburgh literati alike, with the satirical trilogy Holy Willie's Prayer , The
Holy Fair and Address to the Devil attracting particular attention. The object of Burns's poetic
scorn was the kirk, whose ministers had obliged him to appear in church to be publicly
condemned for fornication - a commonplace punishment in those days.
Burns spent the winter of 1786-87 in the capital, lionized by the literary establishment.
Despite his success, however, he felt trapped, unable to make enough money from writing to
leave farming . He was also in a political snare, fraternizing with the elite, but with radical
views and pseudo-Jacobite nationalist sympathies that constantly landed him in trouble. His
frequent recourse was to play the part of the unlettered ploughman-poet, the noble savage
who might be excused his impetuous outbursts and hectic womanizing.
He had, however, made useful contacts in Edinburgh and as a consequence was recruited
to collect, write and rearrange two volumes of songs set to traditional Scottish tunes. These
volumes, James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Select Scottish Airs ,
contain the bulk of his songwriting , and it's on them that Burns's international reputation
rests, with works like Auld Lang Syne , Scots , Wha Hae , Coming Through the Rye and Green Grow
the Rushes , O . At this time, too, though poetry now took second place, he produced two
excellent poems: Tam o' Shanter and a republican tract, A Man's a Man for a' That .
Burns often boasted of his sexual conquests, and he fathered several illegitimate children,
but in 1788, he eventually married Jean Armour , a stonemason's daughter from Mauchline,
with whom he already had two children, and moved to Ellisland Farm, near Dumfries. The
following year he was appointed excise o cer and could at last leave farming, moving to
Dumfries in 1791. Burns's years of comfort were short-lived, however. His years of labour on the
farm, allied to a rheumatic fever, damaged his heart, and he died in Dumfries on July 21, 1796,
aged 37.
Burns's work, inspired by a romantic nationalism and tinged with a wry wit, has made him
a potent symbol of “Scottishness”. Ignoring the anglophile preferences of the Edinburgh elite,
he wrote in Scots vernacular about the country he loved: an exuberant celebration that filled a
need in a nation culturally colonized by England. Today, Burns Clubs all over the world mark
every anniversary of the poet's birthday with the Burns Supper , complete with Scottish
totems - haggis, piper and whisky bottle - and a ritual recital of Burns's Ode to a Haggis .
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