Ailsa?

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Penny Tray
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Ailsa?

Post by Penny Tray »

The following letter, which appeared in the Glasgow Herald, suggests that AILSA CRAIG wasn’t referred to by that name until Robert Burns introduced it in his poem, “DUNCAN GRAY”:-

“Duncan fleech’d and Duncan pray’d;
Ha, Ha, the wooing o’t,
Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig,
Ha, Ha, the wooing o’t.”

Sir,

AILSA CRAIG

Perhaps the following may interest your readers at a time when Ailsa Craig is under discussion.

While on a visit to Burns’s Cottage Museum, I was in conversation with the then curator in front of the framed poem, “DUNCAN GRAY.” Having remarked that Burns appears to have been the first to add “CRAIG” to the name of “AILSA,” and so form the name of “AILSA CRAIG,” which he does in “DUNCAN GRAY” (my source of information being the Annals of the Andersonian Naturalists Society), Mr Mitchell told me about an American visitor who had been reading the poem on the wall of the museum, and then asked Mr Mitchell, who was at the counter, “Are there any of the Craig family still alive?” He had read, “Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig”!

ARCHIBALD SHANKS
Dalry, Ayrshire, February 12, 1907.
Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.
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