Burns Cottage Alloway
Burns Cottage in Alloway near Ayr in Ayrshire is the birthplace of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, a thatched cottage of 1757 built by the poet's father William Burnes and the place where Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in circumstances that immediately entered the mythology of Scottish cultural life. The cottage is the centrepiece of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, managed by the National Trust for Scotland, which combines the original cottage with a modern visitor centre providing one of the most comprehensive accounts of the poet's life, work and cultural legacy available anywhere in the world.
Burns is the most universally celebrated Scottish writer, his poetry and songs known in translation across the world and his birthday the occasion for the annual Burns Night supper celebrated wherever Scots and those of Scottish descent gather in January. The cottage where he was born, modest and whitewashed, provides the most direct physical connection to the life that began here and that would produce some of the most beloved poetry in the English language and the world's most sung song, Auld Lang Syne.
The surrounding Alloway village contains the ruined Alloway Kirk where the witches danced in Tam o' Shanter and the Brig o' Doon bridge over which Tam escaped the pursuing witch, both settings of the poem that Burns himself considered his finest work. The combination of the cottage, the museum and the Tam o' Shanter landscape makes Alloway one of the most complete literary heritage experiences available in Scotland.