Month: October 2016
It’s a’ for the apple he’ll nourish the tree
Today, Friday 21st October, marks Apple Day in the UK. We at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum have been lucky enough this year to open an orchard consisting of 39 trees in the smallholding beside Burns Cottage. The orchard has 28 different varieties of tree, many of which are Scottish in origin, and we are grateful to the organisation ‘Scottish Fruit Trees’ who supplied us with them, as well as advising us on their selection.
In 1756, William Burnes (Robert’s father), took lease of the 7 acres of land around Burns Cottage. The following year, he built the first two rooms of what went on to become the four roomed Cottage that we know today, but it was always his plan to create a market garden on his land – he called this the ‘New Gardens’ project. Burnes was an ‘improver’ and sought new ways of doing things, evident in both his building of Burns Cottage and in his plans for the smallholding. As well as his own land, he worked as a gardener for a John Crawford at Doonside House in Alloway, and had previously been involved in the landscaping of Edinburgh’s Hope Park – now the Meadows.
Unfortunately for William, his New Gardens project did not prosper. Today, over 250 years later, the National Trust for Scotland is trying to recreate some of his ideas, starting with the orchard which was officially opened in July this year.
The national celebration of Apple Day was launched in 1983 by Common Ground, intended to raise awareness of the biodiversity and ecology that we are in danger of losing. Over the years, events celebrating apple day have increased, and have grown in scope – for example encouraging people towards healthy eating. As a lover of nature, Robert Burns would no doubt have been delighted to see his father’s project taken forward, and would have enjoyed watching the trees in our orchard grow year by year. We’ve already been able to watch our trees grow nicely over the last 3 months, and are looking forward to future opportunities to make more of our smallholding here at Burns Cottage!
We hope wherever you are today you’re able to celebrate Apple Day one way or another – why not let us know what you’re doing or send us some pictures?
Writing on the glass
The second of our guest blog posts from students at the University of Glasgow focusses on Burns’s habit of engraving poetry into glass windows… and the potential parallels with how we use social media today!
We all have things we want to say, whether they be in public or private. Robert Burns, a poet known for his way with words, was not without this urgency to express what he felt was important to him. Often saying them in a manner that was not altogether lawful, one of Burns’s tendencies was to engrave windows with his own words, both in public and private places, as a means of expressing himself. Though it is not as common for people to carve their thoughts into nearby windows today, we still have the same urge to express our views. However, for our generation the ‘windows’ are the windows of the internet, through which a large portion of society can easily express their views from a distance. Through these expressions , projected on a significantly more public level, it is questionable what, in both Burns’s case and ours, gives our words their worth.
Three window panes featuring Burns poems were found in the Globe Inn in Dumfries, which became one of Burns’s favourite places to drink. The verses, found in one of the upstairs lodging rooms, include him expressing his views on the worth of sex and war, the final line of one poem reading: ‘I’m better pleased to make one more, | Than be the death of twenty.’ Though there was a social risk in him saying these controversial things, which likely went against society’s conventional views, there was also a physical risk of vandalizing other people’s property, meaning that the outcome of such an expression could have had lawful repercussions. So for Burns the risks were not only community-based, in endangering his reputation, but also legal. With this considered, it is clear that these words were of great worth to Burns by the risks he took in ensuring their perpetuity. He is not just writing these words to be heard, but writing them to be remembered.
To align this with the modern means we have of expressing oneself through social media, we are faced with some similar risks. In the action of speaking out today, we are faced with more social risks: our anxiety is more concerned with how many likes/retweets/shares we get. We want people to know the things that we have to say. Because of this, it often seems as if our words only gain value, rather than having value in the first instance. Through using social media as a tool to express ourselves, we are not only putting ourselves out there but also, and perhaps more importantly, seeking a response from them. Unlike Burns’s expressions engraved on window panes, we are more concerned with who likes what we have to say than what we are actually saying.
‘Sound be his sleep and blythe his morn,
That never did a lassie wrang;
Who poverty ne’er held in scorn,
For misery ever tholed a pang.’
I don’t know what motivated Burns to engrave those windows, and I don’t know why people post what they post on social media, but from these comparisons it is clear that expression in society has shifted. The internet is at our fingertips today, and is as permeant as a pane of glass. However, as I write more words of my own onto the glass of the internet, I wonder how we would use our words if all the ‘expressions’ we engrave on the ‘walls’ of social media, were instead inscribed on the windows of our own homes. How then would you value what you had to say, if it not only altered your view to the outside world, but also altered the world’s view of you?
By Kathryn Thomson
Burns Birthplace Blog 