Ayr: Robert Burn's Birthplace

On our next day trip, we visited the city, Ayr to see Robert Burn's birthplace. Ayr is located on the southwest coast of Scotland, about one hour from Glasgow. I don't remember this day quite as well as others and my camera died just a few hours into the day, so I know I'm missing some details in this post unfortunately. We took the train down to Ayr and then had to take a couple of buses. I remember we got the times a little mixed up so we ended up having to wait a long time both on the way to the museum and on the return trip. When we finally did make it to Ayr we had to walk about a half hour from the bus stop to the site. Luckily it was a nice day and it wasn't raining! The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum has a garden, cottage, and a more modern museum with information/artifacts, etc.

First, we took a tour of the cottage where Robert Burns was born and raised. Here is the entrance to the grounds. (If you don't know who Robert Burns is, he is the most popular and revered poet in Scotland.)

 

The Cottage

Our tour guide.

We couldn't take pictures inside the cottage, so here are a couple I found off the Internet. There were only three rooms in the house. Here is the bedroom/kitchen. They only had one tiny bed so the whole family (8 people) slept sitting up. 

This was the first room in the house and it is actually more like a barn for their cows, horses, and other farm animals. Yep, they shared their house with the animals. Gross. Right next door to this room was a room with a table and chairs. I believe that's where they ate and Robert had tutoring/school lessons. For these lessons he had to memorize scriptures or other writing. The paragraph was tacked onto a little wooden paddle (kinda like a ping pong paddle) and when he was working in the fields he would read it and practice memorizing the verse. When he came home for the day he would pass it off. 

On the windows of the house hundreds of people have carved their initials or notes to Robert Burns in the glass. I wish I had a picture of it, it actually looked really cool. Another random thing I learned on the tour is that before Michael Jackson died he recorded a bunch of Robert Burn's poetry set to music. (Think Red, Red, Rose, Auld Lang Syne, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond) The album wasn't released before he died, so they are working on getting all the rights in order so that they can release it eventually.

After we went to the cottage we walked around the gardens for a while and also saw the cemetery where Robert Burns is buried.

Famous mouse statue from one of Robert Burn's poems

Inside the memorial, which was being renovated. 

Cemetery where some of the Burns family is buried. 

Is it creepy that one of my favorite things to do in Europe was look at old headstones? They are just sooo old! 

Throughout the cemetery are tiles with parts of Burns poems written on them. 

The church in the cemetery is famous because it is the kirk in the poem, "Tam O'Shanter."

I saw at least three weddings in Scotland. The groomsmen wear kilts and there are always bagpipers that walk ahead of the wedding party wherever they go.

Cute little inn at the end of the street. 

The museum had some original copies of Robert Burns poems, artifacts, and random activities. I think it was more geared toward little kids, but it was still pretty cool. They had a "trysting tree" where you leave a note for your significant other on one of the branches. Excuse the creepy faces please. 

This was probably the point in the day where things started going downhill. As I said before, we missed our bus back to the train station. After waiting for the next bus for about a half hour in the hot afternoon we realized that there was no bus coming at all that day. Instead, we walked to another bus station, but not before I got a huge rip in my pants. Yeah, that was fun. I also got a huge migraine on the train back to Glasgow. I was planning on going to the beach in Prestwick on the way home, but after all these events transpired I was ready to be done for the day.