Ayr has a special place in Scotland's ancient history

I’m well aware Burns was born in the village of Alloway, but for many years now Alloway has been a suburb of Ayr and if you consult the national tourist agency VisitScotland’s website it says his birthplace was Alloway, Ayr. So does Tripadvisor and I never argue with them.

When Burns was born on January 25, 1759, Alloway was a distinct village south of the town of Ayr, but Burns will always be connected to Ayr not least because of these lines in his most famous poem Tam O’Shanter:

This truth fand honest Tam o’ Shanter,

As he frae Ayr ae night did canter:

(Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses,

For honest men and bonnie lasses.)

The town’s football club to this day rejoices in the nickname the Honest Men, while the lasses, of course, are aye bonnie.

Burns also wrote one of my favourite poems, the Brigs of Ayr, in 1786 to mark the construction of a new bridge over the river near to the Auld Brig. He describes the two bridges having a conversation, and if you have not read it then please find it online and you’ll witness how our national Bard knew the history of Ayr and how he created a tour de force of imagination.

But there is so much more than Burns to Ayr, one of Scotland’s most historic towns, as I hope to show in this column, the second in a series of the histories of the ancient towns of Scotland with the emphasis on ancient as I will be charting the early periods of each town.

As I wrote last week, Scotland is a “townie” nation, with more people living in towns and villages than in our eight cities combined.

To be included in my list of ancient towns I set some criteria – the histories will all deal with towns up to the year 1900 as I will return to them in a future series on twentieth-century Scotland. They all date from before the Reformation; they all played a role, however small, in the history of our nation; and they all have histories that have been thoroughly researched.

I remind you that I am a writer about history, not a qualified historian, so this series, like much of my work, is based on other people’s prior research which I will acknowledge when I can. Any mistakes are mine, and please email me on nationalhamish@gmail.com if you spot any errors.

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Ayr is one of the few towns in Scotland that has an ancient county named after it and also served as the “county town”, hosting the headquarters of the local authority. Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire and Dumfriesshire will all feature in this series, but today I want to show how special – a word I always use advisedly – Ayr has been in the history of Scotland.

We do not know the exact derivation of the town’s name. It comes from the river of that name and at one time Ayr was known as Inver (mouth of) Ayr, a word which may simply mean a watercourse in Brythonic.

From the presence of a standing stone at Doonfoot, we can deduce that the area was occupied during the late Stone Age but no major finds have indicated that Ayr was a Neolithic settlement.

The town has a known past dating back to the Roman occupation of southern Scotland in the first and second centuries AD. Archaeological remains discovered over the centuries have shown that the area around Ayr was a battleground for the Romans and the ancient Celtic tribes the Romans called Caledonians.

In Volume III of Caledonia, or an Account Historical and Topographical, of North Britain from the most ancient to the present times, by that great 19th century antiquarian George Chalmers (1742-1825), it states: “There are manifest indications that the whole of the lower part along the sea coast from river to river (Ayr and Doon) has been the scene of some great struggle in which the Romans and the natives were combatants, and that probably in more than one conflict.

"Throughout the whole of this space, Roman and British places of sepulchre are found, with Roman armour, swords, lances, daggers, and pieces of mail and brazen camp vessels intermixed with British urns of rude baked clay, hatchet and arrow heads, and other implements of warfare used by the Caledonians.”

Even in the last decade finds were still being made by archaeologists which suggest that Ayr was the site of a marching camp linked to the known fortification at Girvan.

Iraia Arabaolaza, a project officer with GUARD Archaeology, explained in 2019: “There was a ford across the River Ayr just below the Roman marching camp, and ships may have been beached on the nearby shoreline. The Ayr marching camp is 20 miles from the nearest Roman camp to the south at Girvan, which corresponds to a day’s march for a Roman soldier.

“There is a little more distance to other Roman camps to the north-east near Strathaven. Altogether this suggests this site was chosen as a strategic location for the Roman conquest of Ayrshire.”

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Like so much of Scottish history, we know very little about Ayr during the rest of the first millennium, but it can be surmised that a settlement grew up around the mouth of the River Ayr where it empties into the Firth of Clyde.

The first mention of Ayr in written history emphasises its royal connections. King William I, the Lion, built a new castle beside the River Ayr in the latter part of the 1190s and in 1202 he decided to create a burgh around that castle, laid out in a grid form that can still be approximated.

The charter of foundation of that burgh is one of the oldest in Scotland and emphasises the King’s generosity to his new burgh to which he granted nearby lands and also the privilege of holding a market each Saturday, while Ayr was also to have freedom from tolls.

It is important to know that Ayr was William the Lion’s fortress against the troublesome kingdom of Galloway, and thus the town became an important strategic location with defensive walls being built around it.

It was as a port that Ayr began to develop, however, and by 1236 King Alexander II was able to grant more land south of the burgh including Alloway. That charter mentions that cultivated wood had to be used for ships and not burned, suggesting that the town was already a port of some stature.

With growth came religion, and at least two orders of monks set up their institutions in the burgh, with the Dominicans, or black friars, the most prominent.

What is now Ayr Academy can trace its history all the way back to a school of some kind which was in existence in 1233. Most probably this was a school run by monks or friars to teach Latin to the children of local merchants.

Hitherto crossed at a ford, a wooden bridge was first erected over the River Ayr in 1237, and such was the growing importance of trade to the burgh that it was granted an annual fair by royal decree in 1261.

There are accounts of Ayr being besieged by the Vikings and certainly King Alexander III appreciated its strategic position as he held court in the town on several occasions. It may have been from Ayr that he led his forces to confront the invading Norwegian navy and army and win the Battle of Largs in 1263. The burgesses of Ayr let the side down, however, as they refused to garrison the castle despite being ordered to do so.

By the end of the thirteenth century Ayr was wrapped up in the Wars of Independence. The incident of the Barns of Ayr is recounted by Blind Harry in his epic poem about William Wallace and, whether you believe Harry or not, something seems to have happened near Ayr in July 1297 which sparked Wallace into even greater rebellion.

The English commanders seem to have invited the Scottish leadership to the Barns under a truce, but then treacherously slew them all, including relatives of Wallace, as Harry describes:

“No Scot escaped that time who enter’d in, Unto the baulk they hang’d up many a pair; Then in some by-nook cast them there.

Since the first time that men did war invent To so unjust a death none ever went.

Thus to the gods of their cruel wrath They sacrificed the Scots and broke their faith; Such wickedness, each Christian soul must own, Was ne’er before in all the world known.

Thus eighteen score to death they put outright, Of barons bold and many a gallant knight; Then last of all, with great contempt and scorn, Cast out the corpse, naked as they were born.”

Harry then records what Wallace did – basically he and his men killed every Englishman they could find, burning many of them in their beds, while the Prior of the Dominican religious house armed his friars and slaughtered 70 English soldiers.

Wallace then went on the rampage against the English occupiers across Scotland, his rising against them leading to the victorious Battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297.

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Edward I considered the Burgh of Ayr to be important to his intended conquest of Scotland, but Robert the Bruce denied him the use of the castle by burning it down – part of his scorched-earth policy.

Longshanks had the castle rebuilt and Ayr was occupied by an English garrison until they were ousted by Bruce’s forces in 1312.

The Battle of Bannockburn having secured Scotland independence, it was at Ayr in 1315 that the Scottish Parliament met in the church of St John the Baptist to decide that if the Bruce died childless, the crown would pass to his brother Edward.

Ayr’s growing merchant classes were not afraid to display their wealth. The magnificent Loudon Hall, built by the family of that name, dates from 1513 and has been superbly restored.

As a port exporting Scottish goods and importing such necessities as salt and wine, Ayr developed with a harbour that made Ayr the premier port on the west coast. But like every port in the land, Ayr brought in a most unwanted visitor – Bubonic Plague. In seven major outbreaks up until 1670, the town lost hundreds of its population at a time.

Ayr was one of the first towns to embrace the Reformation but the people were not exactly filled with Knoxian fervour – parish records show that the Kirk Session was kept busy disciplining the new congregations. They were still doing so when Robert Burns came along two centuries later… During the conquest of Scotland by Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army, Ayr was occupied and a vast new citadel was built on the site of the castle. Part of its remains dating from 1654 can still be seen.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century Glasgow came to prominence and while Ayr was still growing and changing, with the development of Wallacetown a major increase.

Ayr transformed to be a smaller port and a tourist attraction, especially after the railways came to the town in 1840, many of the visitors attracted by the magic name of Burns. I’ll return to the subject of this fascinating town in a future column.