Burns Cottage Museum, Alloway

Built in 1900, and extended over the years, Burns Cottage Museum now houses the world's most important collection of Burns manuscripts and artefacts. Several hundred original manuscripts of Burns' poems, songs and letters are complemented by a fascinating collection of personal items belonging to the Poet and his family.

The museum also has a wide collection of so-called 'Burnsiana', mementoes of Burns and his work which demonstrate his continuing popularity, and a library stocked with thousands of books by or about Robert Burns. The names of the rooms; Alloway, Tarbolton and Mauchline are taken from those places in Ayrshire where Burns lived, worked and wrote.

Alloway Kirk from the East - John Fleming

Alloway Auld Kirk had ceased to be used for worship some hundred years before this painting was executed in 1816. The kirkyard in which William Burnes, father of the poet, was buried in 1784 is in the foreground while the cottage he built - and in which Robert Burns was born - lies far in the distance.