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The National Monument to Burns
is located on Regent Road, on the flank of Calton Hill. A rather florid and prettified affair, it seems to sum up Edinburgh’s rather gentrified view of Burns.
From here you can look down to Holyrood Palace, the revived Scottish Parliament and Canongate Kirkyard - number 12. on this plan.
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On Calton Hill is the monument to Dugald Stewart. He was a key philosopher and psychologist of the Scottish Enlightenment. But he was also an Ayrshire laird, a supporter of Burns, and much admired by the poet.
Also at
Number 14 Calton Hill (below the monument) was the later residence of Agnes McLehose, or Clarinda, Burns’s Edinburgh flame.
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In St James’ Square (or what is left of it) tucked between the St James Shopping Centre and Register House, is the house where Burns lodged on his second Edinburgh sojourn. Then number 12, it is now number 30.
After an accident blamed on a drunken coachman, the poet was cooped up on the attic level for several weeks with a dislocated knee.
Frustrated and bored he read the Bible from end to end (with great literary satisfaction), edited Scots songs, and began the famous correspondence with ‘Clarinda’. Here also he may have begun his parallel affair with Clarinda’s maid Jenny Clow.
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Just round the corner is the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Here you can see the Flaxman statue of Burns, originally sited in the Burns Monument, and two superb portraits by Burns’s artist friend, Alexander Nasmyth.
Burns was not an introspective character but he did see himself as a mixter-maxter of abilities and follies.
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Ascending to the Old Town’s High Street you reach the heart of Edinburgh in Burns’s day. His first lodging was at Mrs Carfrae’s in Baxter’s Close in the Lawnmarket - 469 High Street. Here he enjoyed the use of a deal table and a half share in a chaff bed for eighteen pence.
The landlady was very upset by the loose living upstairs neighbours’ base jades who, in her own words,
" lie up gandygoing with their filthy fellows, drinking the best of wines, and singing abominable songs, they shall one day lie in hell, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth over a cup of God’s wrath"
Behind Baxter’s Close is Lady Stair’s House, now ‘The Writers Museum’ which focuses on Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Around St Giles Cathedral were the Luckenbooths where Burns’s publisher, William Creech, had his shop. St Giles Cathedral now has a magnificent memorial window to Burns by the Icelandic artist Leifur Breidfjord. Opposite and below St Giles is Anchor Close where, in William Smellie’s print shop, Burns edited his proofs. Smellie was the first editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and one of the poet’s drinking cronies.
During the Enlightenment, Edinburgh’s taverns were centres of conviviality and learning. Dounie Douglas Tavern in Anchor Close was the meeting place of the Crochallan Fenables, a literary drinking club in which the national poet played a full part.It is for gatherings like these that Burns composed his best ‘Edinburgh’ poem To a Haggis.
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Burns’s other favourite watering hole was Johnnie Dowie’s Tavern in Libberton’s Wynd, a now lost thoroughfare from near St Giles to the Cowgate. Then, as now, parts of the Cowgate were an edgy part of town, where Burns visited Jenny Clow and other young women who lived in a demi-monde between economic dependence and prostitution.
Looking down on the Cowgate from George IV Bridge are Edinburgh’s Central Library and, opposite, the National Library of Scotland. Both are treasure troves of information and research on Robert Burns and Edinburgh
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Ascending again from the Cowgate you reach Edinburgh’s South Side - the University quarter. Here Clarinda lived in genteel poverty at 58 Potterrow (now demolished), yet within reach of fashionable George Square. Nearby on West Nicolson Street Burns’s poet friend, the blind Dr Blacklock, lived in Pear Tree House, now a busy hostelry but still boasting the pear trees.
Burns had to sneak into 58 Potterrow to avoid gossip. The relationship between Sylvander and Clarinda was a wordy, and perhaps overheated, affair.
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Beyond George Square was parkland and open country. Burns visited Adam Ferguson, the philosopher, at Sciennes Hill House, where he met the young Walter Scott. The building is now part of Sciennes House Place. On another occasion Burns and Alexander Nasmyth walked all the way to Roslin to see the sun rising over the Glen. Burns appreciated the Roslin Inn’s hospitality as much as the more famous Chapel and Castle.
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The Masonic Order which was founded in Scotland was a strong supporter of "brother Burns". At Canongate Kilwinning Lodge, just off the Royal Mile in St John’s Street, the poet was an honoured guest. The Lodge continues in the same building.
Many of Burns’s political principles were rooted in the radical brotherhood of the eighteenth century Masons.
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In Canongate Kirkyard you come closest to Burns’s Edinburgh. The admired Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith is buried here, but so too is Burns’s role model, the Scots poet Robert Fergusson - "my elder brother in the muse" - on the west side of the Kirk.
Burns provided the gravestone for the young, brilliant Fergusson who died tragically just before the poet’s own arrival in Edinburgh.
On the east side is Clarinda’s grave - Agnes McLehose. Whatever the ups and downs of the relationship, one of Burn’s gifts to her and us was a beautiful love song:
Many of Burns’s political principles were rooted in the radical brotherhood of the eighteenth century Masons.