Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns, frequently celebrated as a simple “heaven-taught ploughman”, was an 18th-century socialite on a political mission, according to academic research about his walking tours of Scotland and the notes he made as he travelled and met fans in the Borders region, the Highlands and Lowland Scotland in 1787.
On the eve of annual Burns Night celebrations, scholars from the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow and National Library ofScotland have published details of the Ayrshire farmer’s son’s routes, the places he stayed and the people he met.
Together with his reflections on Scottish society and culture, they reveal that, at the age of 28, Burns was engaged with the leading political issues of the day and was feted by some of the most powerful and wealthy people in Scotland.
“The tour journals are fascinating because they offer us an insight into the life of a poet who was operating at the peak of his powers and reaping the benefits of his new-found fame,” said Professor Nigel Leask, regius chair of English language and literature at the University of Glasgow.
“These texts also show Burns ruminating on some of the pressing social and political issues of the day; far from the figure of the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, at this point he was keeping company with some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the land.”
After touring both sides of the border with England, Burns travelled the Highlands and stayed with the Duke and Duchess of Atholl at Blair Castle. He also dined with the Duke and Duchess of Gordon at Castle Gordon and visited the Culloden battlefield and Cawdor Castle, which features in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Leask now believes that the poet had letters of introduction from Edinburgh patrons that smoothed his path into the upper echelons of nobility. The journals, accompanied by the most complete maps of his routes yet compiled, are included in a new Oxford edition of the Works of Robert Burns: Commonplace Books, Tour Journals and Miscellaneous Prose, edited by Leask and published as part of a major new, fully annotated edition of the writer’s prose.
“I hope this research will inspire people to engage with the work of Burns and consider him as a man who reacted to his surroundings, not only spaces that he passed through, but the social, political and physical environments that he found himself in.”
Working from the handwritten journal and letters that Burns wrote while journeying around Scotland and the north of England in 1787, academics from the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow and National Library of Scotland have retraced the routes which became hugely influential to his work. By comparing his itinerary with early 19th-century road maps of Scotland and northern England, they have developed the first clear picture of his movements. The maps, which are available online, will allow enthusiasts to follow Burns closely through the places and landscapes that inspired him.
A SOLITARY PATH
As I Walk’d By Mysel
by Robert Burns
As I walk’d by myself, and talk’d by myself,
Myself said unto me:
Look to thyself,take care of thyself, For nobody cares for thee
I answer’d myself, and said to myself,
In the self same repartee:
Look to thyself, or not look to thyself,
The self same thing will be!
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