Myths and folklore

Superstition was a potent force within Alloway’s rural culture. Fear of the Devil, Hell and its associated demons was very real and formed the stuff of ‘idle terrors’ for Burns as a child. His mother’s relative, Betty Davidson, lived with the family for a while, and Robert remembered that ‘she had the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks …’.

In ancient times, the notion of ‘thin places’ was used to describe those rare sites where the distance between this world and another seems to collapse. It was often used in a religious sense in Scotland and Ireland, but in Alloway, where Robert Burns was born and where he set his great poem Tam o’ Shanter, the real and the imaginary feel very close together.

Just along the road from Burns Cottage stands Alloway Auld Kirk. Surrounded by a graveyard full of ancient gravestones, it was an eerie place, populated in Robert’s mind by ghosts and other supernatural creatures. Like many places in Alloway, this church would play a key role in one of his most famous poems. After meeting the historian Francis Grose, Robert took the spooky stories he had heard as a child and wove them into the epic Tam. Alloway Auld Kirk and Burns’s poem duly appeared in Grose’s second volume on historic Scottish castles and churches.