East Ayrshire hosts a truly extensive collection of Burns manuscripts, with his former home on the cobbled streets of Mauchline still proving popular with visitors
SET back from The Cross in the picturesque centre of the Ayrshire village of Mauchline, lies a modest building with true national significance.
Number 2 Castle Street was where Robert Burns lived following his wedding to Jean Armour and it was here that he wrote some of his most famous poems and where he found inspiration for memorable characters, such as Holy Willie, whose grave can be found in the graveyard beside the nearby church.
Today Burns House Museum contains manuscripts and objects from Burns’ time in Mauchline, when his romantic entanglements almost led to his departure for the West Indies with Heilan’ Mary and he was forever in trouble with the Kirk.
Who knows what would have happened if Burns had left these shores behind, but his decision to remain has given us a wealth of literature and song and his continuing legacy is as the defining voice of a nation that seeks to find commonality with the rest of the world.
For Bruce Morgan, Collection Care Coordinator for East Ayrshire museums, Burns was the first modern man and his words remain as relevant today as they did when they were written more than 200 years ago.
Born into a rapidly changing society, when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to take hold, Burns could see that much of the old ways would be lost and so he set about collecting traditional folk songs, finding tunes that worked with them, and thereby preserving an immense cultural heritage that would otherwise have disappeared.
“It was a practice that then continued in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when people started to recognise the importance of these ballads and began to record them for posterity, but Burns did it first,” says Morgan.
“He was also right at that cusp of when the Scottish Enlightenment was opening up fresh ideas that were finding their way into poetry.“
Within East Ayrshire’s extensive collection is an original manuscript of Tam O’Shanter, with notations and crossings out that show Burns’ creativity at work.
Meanwhile the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock has a reproduction of the press on which the Kilmarnock Edition of poetry was printed, helping to disseminate Burns’ thoughts and words to a wide audience.
Spread across all of the East Ayrshire museums, including at the Baird Institute in Cumnock, are letters, manuscripts and artefacts that reveal more about Burns and of the world he lived in.
That world was not dissimilar to our own, when technology is again making its impact felt on daily life and new inventions, this time in the shape of robotics and AI, are evolving apace, although we cannot yet predict if the benefits they bring will outweigh their power for destruction.
Only now are we beginning to face up to the impact that 200 years of industrial growth have had on our planet, but if we had stopped to look we could have seen that Burns had already warned us, using a tiny harvest mouse as a symbol for man’s uncaring ways and destructive attitude towards a fragile world.
The Ploughman Poet was immersed in nature and his description of swallows swooping low over cornfields or snowflakes dissolving into a flowing river still strike a note with anyone who witnesses a similar scene today.
Burns had the language to describe such scenes not just because of his own natural eloquence, but because the teachings of the Kirk had given Scotland vastly superior rates of literacy to those encountered further south and because his own father had insisted that his son should receive a high standard of education.
Education is once again in focus as schools endeavour to make up the gaps left by the Covid pandemic and to overcome the problems created for pupils by the cost of living crisis.
Throughout his life Burns always stood with the poor and the marginalised and his belief in the innate dignity of man strikes a chord at a time when many people are facing levels of poverty that have not been experienced for generations.
Today’s Ayrshire ploughmen may drive tractors guided by satellite and spend more time on paperwork than on actually farming, but they remain as close to the themes of love,equality and how we treat the natural world as Robert Burns and in the museums of East Ayrshire they can find many relics of the Bard that will strike a powerful chord.
www.eastayrshireleisure.com
This article was brought to you in partnership with East Ayrshire Leisure
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