Robert Burns's Scotland
Scottish Tours
During 1787, with his book launched and money in his pocket, Burns sets out on a series of journeys through the country. Beginning on May 5th, his wanderings are rather aimless and indecisive and take up a period of a few months.
The First Tour
The companion of his tour through the Border country was the law student Robert Ainslie, and the journal he kept during their travels reveals that Burns looked on nature with the eye of a most average-minded sightseer. Their tour went as far south as Newcastle.
The Second Tour
His next journey took in the most accessible region of the Highlands, the mountains
of Argyll, and this time he neither took a companion nor kept a journal. There
is a romantic notion was that he was visiting Campbell country to visit the
grave of his lost love Mary Campbell.
There is no evidence to back up this theory. On 25th June in a letter to Robert
Ainslie he says: 'I write this on my tour through a country where savage streams
tumble over savage mountains, thinly spread with savage flocks, which starvingly
support as savage inhabitants.'
The Third Tour
For Burns's third tour he was accompanied by William Nicol, which they made in
a small carriage. It took them by way of Bannockburn, which Burns was to celebrate
some six years later in his song 'Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace Bled' -
Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn.They
then traveled onto Stirling where he used a diamond ring that Glencairn had
given him to scratch Jacobite lines on a tavern window-pane. They compare extremely
unfavourably with the Jacobite songs of Alexander MAcDonald.
The injur'd Stewart-line are gone,
A Race outlandish fill their throne;
An idiot race, to honour lost;
Who know them best despise them most
Lines on Stirling
On his journey north through Perthshire, eastwards from Inverness by way of
Moray, and then down the broad peninsula that faces the North Sea in which
his Burness ancestors had
lived, he listened to folk-songs in a language he could understand and his
imagination caught fire. During this tour he was dined by the Duke and Duchess
of Atholl at Blair castle, also the Duke and Duchess of Gordon invited him
to stay at Gordon castle as he made his way south to Aberdeenshire. Burns and
his companion pass through Stonehaven, where the ruins of Dunnottar castle
stand, Burns's grandfather had worked here as a gardener. Here too he met his
cousin the lawyer, he spent two days among his relations and found his aunts,
Jean and Isabel still alive.
The Fourth and Final Tour
Accompanied this time by Dr Adair, a friend of the Minister of Loundoun who had first introduced his poetry to Dr Blacklock in Edinburgh. Burns during this tour spends a memorable eight days with Margaret Chalmers, a distant relative of Gavin Hamilton, who used to read and sing to the blind Dr Blacklock. They had a meeting that was not only physical but intellectual as well.
