Mauchline
Mauchline
is a town visited principally for its connections with Robert
Burns, and was formerly noted for the manufacture of wooden
snuff-boxes. Some of Burns’s
children and friends, including Gavin Hamilton, are buried
in the churchyard, the scene of the poet’s “Holy
Fair,”
but the Church itself was rebuilt in 1829. The “ Burns
House,” where he set up home with Jean Armour, is now
a museum, and nearby is “Auld Nanse Tinnock’s.”
In
the house of Gavin Hamilton, once Burns’s landlord,
is the room in which the poet was married in 1788.
“Poosie Nansie’s” cottage, and the former
“ Whitefoord
Arms” Inn both have well-known Burns associations.
Mauchline Castle, or Abbot Hunter’s Tower is of 15th
cent. date, and contains a fine vaulted hall. An obelisk recalls
five Covenanters hanged in 1685. About a mile to the north
of the town is the Burns Memorial Tower,
neighboured by some model cottages. A little farther west
is Mossgiel farm, rented by Burns and his brother between
1784 and 1788, and where much of his first volume of poems
was completed, before he visited Edinburgh, in 1786. The farm
was rebuilt in 1859. To the north-west, about 2 miles distant,
is Lochlea farm, where the Burns family lived from 1777 to
1784.
