As the author of Robert Burns and Ayrshire, I wont trouble you with how good the book is; instead, Ill tell you why I wrote it, why it`s different from other Burns books and what is in it.

A long time ago (in the late 1980s) I decided to find out more about our national bard and I spent quite some time wandering around towns and villages in Ayrshire discovering places associated with him. There was no book that linked these places to the story of his life or why he had written particular poems about a person, a place or an incident he had witnessed so there was only one thing to do – write a book myself!

After I finished writing The Glasgow Guide, I set to work on the Burns book and finished it about twelve years later. It had grown and grown and had eventually reached around 250,000 words.

The book is divided into three parts: a biography, a guide to Ayrshire`s villages and towns with Burns connections and the appendices. The main purpose of the book is to bring together the people and places he knew, together with the words of his poems and letters and the reasons why he wrote the poems and songs he is so famous for. This is what makes the book so different from any other.

The biography covers Burns` life from his birth in Alloway in 1759 to the year 1788 when he and Jean Armour moved to the farm of Ellisland in Dumfriesshire. It covers his time in the villages of Alloway, Tarbolton and Mauchline and traces his emergence as a poet and his development as “Caledonia`s bard”. His stays in Kirkoswald (where he attended school) and Irvine (where he trained as a flax dresser) are covered and their influences on him are described. Soon after the first edition of his poems were published (in 1786) he made the first of his two long visits to Edinburgh and both of these are covered in some detail, with lots of information on the people he met and those who were the subjects of his poems. Burns made four journeys through Scotland in 1787 and the book traces his routes and relates the stories of his encounters with the people he met.

The guide is the central part of the book and it covers the following towns and villages: Alloway, Auchinleck, Ayr, Catrine, Craigie, Cumnock, Dalrymple, Dundonald, Dunlop, Failford, Fenwick, Galston, Irvine, Kilmarnock, Kilmaurs, Kilwinning, Kirkoswald, Low Coylton, Maidens, Mauchline, Maybole, Monkton, Mossblown, Muirkirk, New Cumnock, Newmilns, Ochiltree, St Quivox, Stair, Stevenston, Stewarton and Tarbolton. Each section deals with Burns` friends and acquaintances with their homes, gravestones or other physical remains acting as the focal point for each entry. For example, the “Highland Mary” Monument in Failford is where the book tells of the story of Burns` relationship with Mary Campbell, and Poosie Nansie`s Inn in Mauchline is where the book relates the story behind the cantata The Jolly Beggars.

The appendices cover a range of material, including Burns` famous autobiographical letters to Dr John Moore, the background to the epic poem Tam o Shanter and memoirs and obituaries written by his brother Gilbert Burns, friend Maria Riddell and former teacher John Murdoch.

The book quotes many of Burns` poems and there are lots of excerpts from his letters to his friends and acquaintances. Many contemporary books are quoted, as well as eighteenth-century accounts of places described in the guide and old newspaper articles, mainly from Ayrshire but also from other parts of Scotland – and even The New York Times. There are two hundred or so illustrations including archive pictures and the author`s own colour photographs.

With all these stories, poems, letters, quotes from books and everything else, it`s no wonder the book is a massive 480 pages long.

I hope you will enjoy it.

Best wishes David Williams