The “auld clay biggin” where, in wild January weather, Burns first saw the light, is two or three miles outside the burgh, close to the Doon and to the haunted Kirk of Alloway. Within the thatched and whitewashed cottage—the shrine of crowds of pilgrims, whose numbers grow with the years—is a little museum of Burns mementoes and curiosities; and the beautiful monument of the poet, a temple raised on lofty fluted columns, overlooks the scene. The road thither leads past the racecourse on the way to Maybole, and crosses the romantic wooded dell through which flows the Water of Doon, by the Auld Brig, the senior by some years of the Brig of Ayr itself. Across its keystone young Robin often trudged on his way to school, after the family had removed to Mount Oliphant, two miles off on the Carrick side. In the churchyard his father, whose portrait is so grandly painted in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” is buried. The “cairn above the well,” the “winnock-bunker in the east,” and other places mentioned in the tale of Tam o’ Shanter’s ride, are still pointed out in or near the roofless and ivy-clad kirk. The neighbourhood is haunted by the strong and familiar spirit of Robert Burns.
Photo: Bara, Ayr.
THE DOON: THE NEW AND THE AULD BRIG.
Having lingered so long on the Ayr, we can only spare time to glance up “Bonnie Doon,” although its charms are scarce less many and celebrated than those of its twin river. Like the Ayr, the channel of its lower course is carved boldly and deeply into the land. It flows, in pool or shallow, under impending crags and steep banks clothed with coppice and greenwood, or past the margin of fertile haughs. It has its ruined castles and venerable mansion houses, its picturesque old kirks and bridges and mills, and its rich dowry of tradition and song. Like its neighbour, too, the Doon draws its strength from waste and solitary places; only, its cradle is in barer and wilder scenes, and is haunted by wilder legends, than are to be found about the headsprings of Ayr. Its windings would bring us to Auchendrane, the home of James Muir, “The Grey Man,” as gruesome a villain as ever figured in history or romance; to the woods and cliffs and walls of Cassilis, the seat of the head of the Kennedys—those most unruly of the unruly men of Garrick—whence Johnnie Faa, the Gipsy, stole away the lady, and where he and his men afterwards dangled from the “Dool Tree”; to many a spot beside, famous in song and legend, until, through long bare moorlands on which mineral works and villages have intruded, we come, past Dalmellington, to the solitary shores of Loch Doon, its tunnelled outlet, its islands and old castle of the Baliols; and beyond it, to the high green hills of Galloway now rising over against the dark heathery slopes of the Carrick fells. And so we reach the sources of the stream under the brow of Merrick in the desolate wilderness of granite and peat-moss that surrounds Loch Enoch and the “Wolf’s Slock,” a region the wildest in the South of Scotland, where Mr. Crockett has found the scenery of his “Raiders” and his “Men of the Moss Hags.”
JOHN GEDDIE.