Robert Burns and Irvine Old
Robert Burns and Irvine Old
In July1781 Robert Burns, aged 22, decided to leave His father’s farm at Lochlea in Tarbolton parish. Robert and his brother Gilbert were growing flax, the wonder crop of the 1780’s, and he came to the heckling shop in Glasgow Vennel, Irvine to learn flax-dressing. He wrote, “Partly through whim, and partly that I wished to set about doing something in life, I joined a flax dresser in a neighbouring town.”
Burns summed up the flax-dressing experience as a “sadly unlucky affair”, attributing the failure to his partner, Samuel Peacock, his mother’s half-brother, who was either involved in smuggling or receiving stolen goods.
During his time in Irvine he stayed in a house in Glasgow Vennel (now rebuilt), and attended worship in Irvine Old, then recently rebuilt.
Tradition has it that Robert Burns took his first communion here.
The heckling work was back-breaking, long and dusty. Illness and depression took their toll on Burns’ spirit. In November he was attended five times in eight days by Dr. Fleming, apparently for acute depression and fever. In December, he wrote to his father in the most melancholic terms.
On Ne’erday 1782, the heckling shop went up in flames. “It left me,” he wrote, “like a true poet, not worth sixpence.”
He stayed on in Irvine, probably working at another heckling shop on High Street until spring on 1782.
The Robert Burns Bicentenary Window
A stained-glass window, designed and created by Susan Bradbury FMGP was donated by Irvine Burns Club and presented to Irvine Old on 2nd June 1996 during the Bicentenary Year of the death of Robert Burns (1759-1796).
Finding comfort in the Bible at a time of crisis, Burns wrote a verse paraphrase of the 1st Psalm, which describes the righteous man a “like a tree planted by the rivers of water”. The stone at lower left bears the first three verses of his paraphrase.
The setting is the Scottish landscape – the tree growing beside a stream, “clear as crystal” (Revelation 22:1); the image of “a falling crystal stream” is one to which the poet frequently returned.
The artist is Susan Bradbury, who first came to Ayrshire as Irvine New Town artist in 1981. Susan chose the colours of autumn – green, gold and brown – the warm golden-orange of a bracken-covered hillside, the grey-gold mixes of lichens on stonework. The gold colours and the blues of the sky provide links with the windows on either side. The sparkle in the stream is achieved by differing degrees of acid-etching of the top green layer of the special glass used here.
The stream and tree are also the River of Life and the Tree of Life of Revelation 22:1-2, 14 & 17); it “bare twelve manner of fruits”; the artist has chosen grapes, a pomegranate, fig, orange, lemon, olive, date, apple, pear, cherries, plums and hazelnuts. “The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” makes us recall Burns’ expression of brotherhood in “A man’s a man for a’ that”.
Burns twice referred to Revelation 7:15-17, which promises a much better life in the hereafter. The Lamb at the throne of God will lead those that serve God “unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes”. The 22-year old Robert told his father how these verse inspired him, and nine years later, in a letter to Peter Hill, his Edinburgh agent and friend, he wrote that, if he could, he would “wipe away all tears from his eyes”. These verses are on the stone at lower right.
The stone tablets, with their balancing Old and New Testament test, could be the golden gates of the entrance to heaven (Revelation 22: 14); they could also be standing stones forming an invitation to walk righteously by a crystal stream.
The window combines rich visual images of the natural world with symbolic links to beautiful passages and to the life and works of Robert Burns.