Hard by, on the Water of Fail, is the Castle o’ Montgomerie, otherwise known as Coilsfield House, where, according to some authorities, Mary Campbell—“Highland Mary”—was dairymaid when Burns was farming at Lochlea, behind the village of Tarbolton, whose “mote hill,” high-standing parish church, and long village street, in which thatched cottages still alternate with more modern dwellings, are only half an hour’s walk away. These “banks and braes and streams” will be associated with this brief and somewhat obscure episode in the poet’s career until song itself is forgotten:—
“Time but the impression stronger makes,
As streams their channels deeper wear.”
If we may trust his verse on the point, the last meeting of the lovers was some trysting-place by the Ayr:—
“Ayr, gurgling, kiss’d his pebbled shore,
Overhung with wild woods, thick’ning green;
The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar
Twin’d am’rous round the raptur’d scene.”
There are scores of spots near the inflow of the Fail to which the description, in “My Mary in Heaven,” of the place of meeting might, apply. But tradition and the poet himself point to the lovely wooded glen of the Fail as the scene of parting; and the very spot, beside a rustic bridge, is shown.