It is hard to find a town or village in Ayrshire that doesn’t have a monument to Robert Burns, but the little town of Mauchline has the honour of being home to the ‘National Burns Memorial’. Together with five cottage homes for ‘deserving people who have fallen on hard times’, the tower was built in 1896 as a memorial to the poet.

Burns (1759-1796) rented a farm near Mauchline from 1784 to 1791, and it was during this period that he produced many of his best-loved poems. He married a Mauchline girl, Jean Armour, who was known as ‘the Belle of Mauchline’.

Whilst living at Mossgiel Farm Burns would visit Mauchline and drink at Poosie Nancy’s tavern, which still stands today. Did he also pop into the town’s Syrian Barbers to have his trademark tousled locks attended to?

The competition to design the monument was won by architect William Fraser (1867-1922) and the foundation stone was laid on 23 July 1896. The crowd present was said to be 10,000 strong, and the procession of trades, guilds, clubs and the general public stretched a mile in length.

The ceremony was followed by a celebratory banquet for the V.I.P.s where the menu included ‘Scotch Haggis’ as an entrée and ‘Burns Tart’ as one of the sweet courses. The Flâneuse hasn’t been able to find a recipe to recreate this for a Burns Night supper, although it seems it may have been something like an Ecclefechan Tart which has nuts and fruit in a pastry case.

The tower became a museum housing Burns memorabilia, and visitors could climb to the top to admire the impressive panorama.

The museum is long gone, but for the last 12 or so years the tower has been home to Johnston Art, showing the work of Elaine Johnston, and if you visit when the gallery is open you might be lucky enough to be invited to climb up to the roof to admire the view (and the artworks en route).

This post will arrive with readers on Burns Night 2025, so best wishes to all who are celebrating this evening. The Folly Flâneuse and the Uncouth Companion will ‘take a cup of kindness’ and toast you all.

For lots more on Mauchline and the monument visit the Ayrshire History website.

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In the 18th century the Campbell family, Earls of Breadalbane, embellished the park around the family seat at Taymouth with temples and mock forts, complementing the natural beauties of the surrounding hills and the River Tay that flows through the estate. Just a couple of miles away, on the shores of Loch Tay, was a more dramatic feature, a rustic shelter and a roaring cascade, which added a sublime element to the beautiful policies of Taymouth.

An exact date for the construction of The Hermitage is not known, but it was extant in 1769 when the traveller and naturalist Thomas Pennant admired the ‘hermitage, the great cataracts adjacent, and the darksome chasm beneath’. Contemporary accounts suggest that the building was the creation of John Campbell (1738-1771), son of the 3rd Earl of Breadalbane, and his wife Wilhelmina (1741-1786), who were styled Lord and Lady Glenorchy. They married in 1761, so the Hermitage was most likely built soon after that date, and was quite new when Pennant saw it.

Most visitors arrived by carriage, but the more intrepid could hire a boat and sail down Loch Tay to a jetty close to the falls. A guide met visitors and led them along a wooded walk and then into a dark, rugged passage.

Senses suitably excited by the gloomy tunnel, the visitor could then gasp in awe as they entered the chamber and found a bow window framing the waterfall ‘in all its splendour’.

The Hermitage, as it has always been known, was built to appear as a cave hewn out of solid rock, although it is actually a carefully constructed sham, with thatch and moss originally disguising the mode of construction.

The earliest 18th century accounts give little mention of the interior, but by 1786 the Hermitage was decorated in a whimsical style as home to an (imaginary) hermit. The seats and bed were dressed with the pelts of wild animals, and the walls were covered in moss and ‘ornament’d with shellwork and plaister in imitation of fruit – which is supposed to be the Hermit’s food’. There was also a shelf of books, which the fictional solitary occupant could apparently peruse to enrich his mind. But this artifice was unconvincing, and in 1803 Dorothy Wordsworth was not fooled, noting that the volumes were wood wrapped with old leather covers. She did however admire the ‘quaint apartment’ and the ‘beautiful prospect’ from the window which took in not only the waterfall, but also the handsome village of Kenmore and Loch Tay (now blocked by trees, but visible from the paths up and down from the Hermitage).

Not everyone shared the general consensus that the building was ‘rural and romantic’. The Reverend James Plumptre was conducted to the Hermitage in 1799 and found the place ‘much too modern and magnificent’ to house a hermit retiring from the world, although he conceded that a ‘London Hermit’ might be quite at home. William Gilpin, the great exponent of the picturesque, was less critical, but felt the Hermitage unnecessary as the waterfall was perfectly capable of enchanting without it.

Many more visitors recorded their visit in poetry and prose, including the famed Robert Burns. On a tour of Scotland in 1787 he visited the Falls of Acharn and composed the poem originally called ‘Written in the Hermitage at Taymouth’, featuring the lines:

Poetic ardours in my bosom swell,
Lone wandering by the hermit’s mossy cell…

This poem was later published as ‘Verses written with a pencil over the chimney-piece, in the parlour of the inn at Kenmore, Taymouth’.

In the middle of the 19th century these lines could still be seen by guests at the inn (as indeed they can today), but for added drama visitors to the Hermitage could hear them recited by the guide, who whilst they were distracted by a first sight of the falls, had slipped into a mask and a costume and ‘came forth personifying an eremite’. Wearing a ‘dress of shaggy goatskin’ and a ‘long and venerable beard of lichens’ the guide appeared ‘to the amusement, and sometimes the alarm, of his visitors’.

The Marquis of Breadalbane was later reported to have wanted to instal a permanent hermit, but ‘no-one could be found bold enough to act out the part’, and anyway candidates would have known that it was much more lucrative to be a loquacious guide and extract tips from the many English visitors: in 1857 it was written that ‘Milk and honey flow abundantly from the lips of the genuine Celtic cicerone; and hard-hearted must the Sassenach be who does not feel the effects of the soft sawder in the most sensitive part of his person, his breeches pocket’.

In 1842 it was reported that the Hermitage had ‘undergone a scrubbing’ in preparation for a visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Sadly this work appears to have been in vain, for whilst the young queen recorded her pleasure at being rowed up Loch Tay with ‘the pipes playing, & boatmen singing old Gaelic songs’, she makes no mention of a visit to see the cascade.

The modern visitor approaches just as the early tourist did. A walk up a ‘steep and rugged path’, followed by a pause to get one’s breath back, and then a moment to gaze ‘with wonder and amazement at the ‘magnificent landscape’ before entering the Hermitage to view the cascade. Sadly, the Hermitage was damaged in a storm in the 1950s: the roof is long gone, and the shellwork interior lost, but this remains an enchanting spot.

Taymouth Castle is currently being renovated as an hotel, but visitors are free to walk in the park. There’s a delightful circular walk to the falls from the hamlet of Acharn.

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The 11th Earl of Buchan, seldom mentioned without the qualifier ‘eccentric’, bought the Dryburgh estate towards the end of the 18th century. He built a new house and improved the grounds, creating a landscape which featured as its centrepiece that ultimate in garden ornaments: a ruined abbey. Further embellishments included this pretty rotunda on a hillock overlooking the Tweed, and a ‘colossal statue’.

David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan (1742-1829), was fascinated by Scottish history and founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780.  He was a man of great imagination, and a patriot who loved his country’s history and its heroes, and although his eccentricity was exaggerated after his death, there is no denying that he decorated the environs of Dryburgh Abbey ‘in his peculiar whimsical way’.

Although Buchan was an admirer of Scotland’s most revered poet, Robert Burns, he was particularly in awe of James Thomson, ‘the Bard of Ednam’ (Ednam being the nearby village where the poet was born). Thomson (1700-1748) was a poet and playwright, whose most famous work The Four Seasons, was published in 1730. There’s no explanation for what was practically an obsession on the part of Buchan, but he lobbied for monuments and memorials to Thomson in Scotland and London as well as building his own tribute – the Temple of the Muses.

In Greek mythology the muses lived with Apollo on Mount Parnassus and were patrons of poets, encouraging their creative calling. So in naming his rotunda the Temple of the Muses, and topping it with a statue of the poet, Buchan made himself clear – Thomson’s work was of the highest order, inspired by the goddesses. The story of Apollo and the Muses was a favourite of Buchan, and on one occasion he created a tableau in his Edinburgh drawing room. Nine ladies ‘of the first rank’ were dressed as the muses, and of course Buchan himself was Apollo. All that was needed to complete the scene was Cupid, so to the ‘astonishment’ of his assembled guests Buchan recruited a ‘blooming boy of ten or twelve’ who made a dramatic entrance, naked except for his bow and quiver.

No architect is mentioned in connection with the ‘fanciful erection’, and it seems likely the temple was the work of Buchan himself, working with his favoured mason, John Smith of Darnick, who also worked for Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.

A grand fete took place at Dryburgh in August 1812 at which the new temple took centre stage. Guests processed from Dryburgh Abbey in the wake of the members of the Masonic Lodge of Newstead – of which Smith the stonemason was Grand Master – and assembled at the temple. Reports of this event include a description of the temple, probably provided by Buchan. The ‘Temple of the Muses’ had nine columns, and on the capital of each was the name of one of the nine muses, inscribed in metallic characters: Clio, Euterpe, Thalie, Melpomene, Terpischore, Erato, Polyhymnie, Uranie and Caliope, the ‘elegant relievo letters’ being the work of John Ruthven of Edinburgh. On top of the dome a ‘beautiful imitation, in stone, of the lyre of Terpischore, found in the ruins of Herculaneum, is surmounted by a bust of Thomson, also cut in stone’.

The celebrations continued at Dryburgh Abbey where a grand feast was served, and then in the early hours the party returned to the temple. Along the way they passed a group dressed in the character of the four seasons, and then marvelled at a large illuminated transparency which Buchan had erected on the opposite side of the river Tweed. After speeches and toasts, and a rousing chorus of ‘Thomson’s grand national song’ (ie Rule Britannia for which the poet had composed the words) there was a ‘brilliant’ display of fireworks.

The newspaper report described the interior as ‘unfinished’, and it would be another 7 years before the central focus was installed. This was a statue of the Apollo Belvedere standing on a ‘circular pedestal with the 9 muses modelled in the die, enriched with laurel leaves’. This impressive piece was supplied by Mrs Coade’s artificial stone manufactory in Lambeth in 1819, at a cost of £119 4s 0d. Sir David Erskine recorded the statue in his sketch book in 1821.

The newly-completed temple (actually an artist’s impression thereof, as it was incomplete) had appeared on the title-page of a volume of Buchan’s writings, published in 1812. The book suggests that at that date the temple was to be dedicated to Thomson and Robert Burns.  Buchan is known to have discussed a statue of Burns with his mason (is that the poet sitting in the temple in this image?) but none is recorded in situ and Apollo eventually took his place.

Opinion was divided as to whether Lord Buchan’s landscape was a triumph or a travesty. A visitor in 1823 praised the earl’s ‘refined and classic taste’ and described the grounds as a ‘little Elysium’. But a year  later a lady dismissed the ‘several odious enormities… and sundry other fooleries.’ Each to their own.

By the second half of the century the temple was dismissed as ‘a very commonplace building’ and one visitor thought it would soon be lost. At date unknown the statue and plinth were removed, and the metallic names of the muses have been spirited away too, and there is but faint trace of them today. The temple survived simply because it became so engulfed in foliage that it was largely forgotten. In 2002, following some remedial work (detail is hard to find), a new bronze statue, representing the Four Seasons, was commissioned from Siobhan O’Hehir (born 1966).

The mason Smith was also responsible for the ‘colossal statue’ (as Buchan himself called it) on the ridge above the temple. It represents Sir William Wallace, the Scottish knight and soldier, who was another of Buchan’s heroes. It was unveiled in 1814, and the striking monument is all the more remarkable as Smith was remembered as ‘a common Stone Mason who had never been taught sculpture’.

For Dryburgh Abbey see https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/dryburgh-abbey/history/

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