Poetic Association—Headstreams of the Ayrshire Rivers—“The Land of Barns”—The Ayr and the Doon—Sorn—Catrine—Ballochmyle—Mossgiel—Manchline—Barskimming—Coilsfield House and the Fail Water—The Coyl—Auchencruive—Craigie—Ayr—The Doon.
THE rivers of Ayrshire have a corner by themselves in the heart of the Scot, and in the memory of the world. “Bonnie Doon” and “auld hermit Ayr” are better known and more extolled on the banks of the St. Lawrence and of the Ganges than nearer streams incomparably greater in length and volume. Why this should be so, the Philistine who takes no account of the magical power of poetry may find it hard to understand. Those waters of Kyle, Carrick, and Cunningham are short of course and lacking in features of scenery that are in any marked degree impressive or sublime. Their beauty, such as it is, they owe as much to Art as to Nature. None of them can be said to be in any genuine sense navigable. It is true that some among them are centres and outlets of important industries. But even in the sordid affairs of trade their valleys hardly take a first rank among Scottish streams. Commercially, and almost geographically, they might be described as mere tributaries of the wealthy Clyde.
SORN(p. [332]).
The headsprings of these Ayrshire waters are nowhere more than twenty or thirty miles distant from the shores of the Firth, and their sources as well as their mouths come within the range of view of travellers by that broad highway to the Broomielaw. They rise for the most part in high and featureless moorlands, where the county of Ayr borders with Galloway, Lanark, and Renfrew, and disappear in the folds of a lower country in which one appraiser of the picturesque has discovered a general character of “insipidity”—a character which every true-born son of Ayrshire will vehemently deny as belonging to the landscapes of his county, pointing, as his witnesses, to many a “flowery brae,” bold crag, and richly-wooded dell watered by the clear currents of his native streams. Some of these slip quietly to the sea behind hills of bent and sand, lonely except for the golfer, the salmon-fisher, and the sea-fowl. Others have at their mouths ancient burghs, busy seaports or pleasant Clyde watering-places flanked by breezy links or steep cliff and headland, that look out across sand and wave to the purple peaks of Arran, to the huge columnar stack of Ailsa Craig, to Bute, and the Cumbraes, and the other wonders of those Western seas.
The county might be likened in shape to a boomerang, or to a crescent moon, with horns tapering to a point towards the north and south, the shore-line from Wemyss Bay to Loch Ryan representing the concave inner edge, and the land frontier, roughly approximating to the boundary of the river-basins, standing for the outer surface. To the north the brown moorlands come near to the sea; the streams are correspondingly short, and the strip of fertile coast-territory narrows to nothing. But from the basin of Garnock to that of Doon there extends a diversified plain country, intersected by broad ridges, veined in all directions by roads and railway lines, full of thriving towns and villages, and amply endowed with the charms of wood, water, rock, and hill, as well as with coalfields, pastures, and cornlands. This is the heart of Ayrshire—the classic ground where the Ayr and the Doon are the chief among a host of streams whose currents flow to the music of the choicest of Scotland’s lyric songs. South of Doon lies the broken sea of hills known as Carrick, a country with a poorer surface and a wilder and higher background of green or heathy mountains, yet with many beautiful and some spacious and famous river-valleys opening between its barer uplands, which run down to the coast in bold promontories, crowned with ancient castles, or front it with walls of cliff pierced with caves in which has found refuge many a legend of the Killing or the Smuggling times.
Not, however, by its memorials and traditions of old strifes—or not by these chiefly—are the hearts and the feet of strangers drawn to Ayrshire. It is the “Land of Burns.” The spirit of the song of the Ploughman-Bard has taken possession of the banks of its streams, and has almost silenced all older and harsher strains. Those who wander by them think less about Bruce and Wallace, the grim deeds of the Earls of Cassilis and Lairds of Auchendrane, and the dour faces and pathetic deaths of the martyrs of the Covenant, than of Tam o’ Shanter glowering in at the “winnock-bunker” of Alloway’s auld haunted kirk, of the “Jolly Beggars” feasting and singing round Poosie Nancy’s fireside at Mauchline, and of all the rustic Nells and Jeans, and Nannies and Bessies, and Marys, with whose praises Burns has made the waters of Ayr vocal for all time. But chiefly the music of their currents seems to be a running accompaniment to his own stormy life. It reminds us of his youthful saunterings “adoun some trottin’ burn’s meander” while the voice of poetry in him was yet only struggling for utterance; of his later hours of rapture or of anguish in meetings with his “Bonnie Jean” in the woods of Catrine or Barskimming or Ballochmyle, or in his parting with Highland Mary where the Fail steals by leafy coverts past the Castle o’ Montgomerie to meet the Ayr; and all the other episodes of passionate or pawky love which he turned to song as naturally and spontaneously as do the birds.