Bachelors Club Location: Sandgate St, Tarbolton, Mauchline KA5 5RB
Opening times: 3 April to 27 September, 12.00 noon – 4.00pm Friday to Monday. Closed all other times.
Entry: Adult £5.00, concession £3.50, family £12.00, one adult family £9.00, Young Scot £1.00, National Trust for Scotland members free.
Access: Street parking, no charge.
It’s another blazing day in sunny Scotland, with the temperature hitting 33°C / 91.4°F during my journey. That’s within touching distance of the legendary summer of ‘76’s recorded peak of 35.9°C / 96.6°F, and way too hot to spend all day in the car, so I am not straying too far from home. I’m heading back into Burns Country, my first destination being the site of the Bachelors’ Club he founded with his brother Gilbert and several others in Tarbolton, Ayrshire, in 1780.
Robert, Gilbert, their parents, and their five siblings moved to the Tarbolton area after Burns’ father William Burnes secured a seven-year lease for nearby Lochlea Farm in 1777. Burns was eighteen at the time and some years away from his fame.
The Bachelors’ Club is the white building on the left. The red building is a pharmacy and together they make a perfect photogenic pair. In Burns’ day the white building was an alehouse owned by one John Richard. The upstairs room was, in today’s terminology, a function room, which Richard hired out for use by the local community. Note the roof; the Club is one of the remaining 200 or so buildings in Scotland retaining a once ubiquitous thatched roof.A recreation of John Richard’s living quarters on the ground floor. After his time the premises had various other owners up until 1928, after which it lay empty. Ayr Council planned its demolition in 1937, a move opposed by the Burns Federation and the National Trust for Scotland (NTS). The Second World War interrupted the debate, and the Trust acquired the property for the nation in 1951. Today, John Richard’s room is where visitors are greeted by the NTS representative on duty; in my case this was Phoebe, who gave an excellent introductory talk on the premises. The upstairs room, which our friends at Wikipedia describe as “the largest in Tarbolton”, which is not very large at all. It was here on 11 November 1780 that Hugh Reid, Alexander Brown, Thomas Wright, William M’Gavin, Walter Mitchell, and Robert and Gilbert Burns first met to debate and drink, which in today’s terminology might be called “going to the pub”. Anyhoo, the Bachelors’ Club was born. Although not written in his hand, Burns is believed to have drafted the Club rules. These included “Every man proper for a member of this Society, must have a frank, honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean; and must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex”, and “No haughty, self-conceited person, who looks upon himself as superior to the rest of the club, and especially no mean spirited, worldly mortal, whose only will is to heap up money shall upon any pretence whatever be admitted”. In 1779, the year before the formation of the Bachelors’ Club, Burns took dancing lessons here “to give my manners a brush”. This didn’t it well with his father, who was very much ‘down with that sort of thing’. It was also here, in 1781, that Burns was initiated into the Freemasons.
William Burnes died at Lochlea Farm in 1784, the same year the lease was due to expire. As the farm had not proven financially successful, Robert and Gilbert elected not to renew and moved the family to Mossgiel Farm, just outside Mauchline, thus effectively ending the Burns brothers’ association with the Bachelors’ Club and Tarbolton. Lochlea Farm is now a distillery.
My own even briefer association with Tarbolton has also come to an end and I head east along the B744 / Tarbolton Road toward my next destination, the National Burns Memorial in Mauchline. But before that, I’m going to have a quick stop here…
This cairn commemorates Burns’ time at Mossgiel Farm, which can be seen in the background. Part of the inscription reads, “Robert Burns 1759 – 1796. The Bard farmed here at Mossgiel 1784 – 1786”. Mossgiel is still a farm and is privately owned today.A closer look at the farm, which is not as Burns would remember it. In his day it was just a three-room But’n’Ben. It was here, the story goes, that Burns accidently destroyed a mouse’s nest while ploughing, an incident that led him to compose one of my favourite poems, ‘To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November 1785’. According to Gilbert, Burns composed the poem on the spot, while still holding the plough. Other poems written at Mossgiel include ‘Hallowe‘en’, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, and ‘The Twa Dogs’.
National Burns Memorial Location: 10 Burns Memorial Cotts, Mauchline KA5 5LQ
Opening times: Currently closed.
Entry: Non-applicable.
Access: Street parking, no charge.
Mauchline is pretty important in the Burns story. Mossgiel Farm is just a mile or so outside of town and, as noted, is where Burns composed some of his best-loved works. Mauchline was also the birthplace of his wife Jean Armour, who met Burns on the drying green around 1784 when she chased his dog away from her laundry. It is also where their first children were born in 1786, twins which they imaginatively named Robert and Jean. They had another set of twins two years later, two unnamed girls who died shortly after a birth. They are buried in the local churchyard. Based on all this Mauchline was as appropriate a location as any for a National Burns Memorial.
Work began on the National Burns Memorial in 1896, the centenary of the poet’s death. The architect was Hugh Fraser, who won a national competition with his design, and it is said that up to 10,000 people attended the laying of the foundation stone. The cottages seen behind the memorial were part of the contract, and as such had to complement the monument. These houses were allocated to ‘deserving people that had fallen on hard times’. Until this week I never even knew there was a National Burns Memorial, and having now visited it I’m still not sure there is.Striking though it undoubtedly is, there is nothing about the tower that connects it with Burns. Apparently its interior once housed some Burns-related memorabilia, but this was somewhat superfluous considering the town already had a Burns’ House Museum. The Memorial is now permanently closed, and even the Johnston Fine Art Gallery occupying the ground floor seems to have shut up shop. As such, the building is more of a folly than a memorial. What would those 10,000 people from 130 years ago think of the rather forlorn state of the monument that had caused such pride and excitement back then? With no interior to explore and no views from the rooftop on offer, I decided to sit down opposite the Memorial and, apropos of nothing (actually, apropos of the baking heat), use Snapseed to make one of my photos look like like a postcard from the 1976 heatwave. I think it looks appropriately washed out, but if I possessed the skills I would remove all the vehicles to the left of the tower except the cyclist.
Destination or Diversion?
Even combined the Bachelors’ Club and the National Burns Memorial are no more than a diversion, but I have another couple of Burns related sites on my agenda and will write about them in my next entry. Meanwhile, here are some links to my previous jaunts into Burns Country: Burns Birthplace Cottage; Poet’s Path; Alloway Auld Kirk and the Brig o’ Doon; the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum; Alexander Goudie’s series of paintings depicting scenes from Tam O’ Shanter at Rozelle House Museum and Galleries; and, although not officially in Burns Country, the Robert Burns House Museum in Dumfries.
