The spirit of Scotland’s greatest poet lures visitors from around the world to... : Burns COUNRTY

“Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh,

Where ghaists and houlets nightly cry.”

--Robert Burns

A better setting for a ghost story would be hard to imagine.

Hemmed in on all sides by crumbling gravestones, a roofless church broods under towering beech trees. This is Kirk-Alloway, picturesquely derelict since 1766.

Nobody can say why it was abandoned. But like the weeds that ran riot in the empty nave, rumors flourished--grisly, eerie rumors. For years the local people gave the place a wide berth, especially at night.

Today this modest ruin is one of Scotland’s top tourist attractions. Loch Ness may draw more visitors in the monster-hunting season, but Kirk-Alloway offers its ghost hunters something more: the certainty of finding at least one ghost.

An average of 50,000 visitors a year walk these grassy aisles. Most of them are drawn by the same force that drew me: the spirit of Robert Burns. Dead these 200 years, Burns is still a living presence throughout this lovely corner of Scotland.

“Alloway’s auld haunted kirk” is the setting for the comically macabre witch orgy in “Tam o’ Shanter,” the poet’s masterpiece.

Burns played among these stones as a boy. From here you can retrace his ghostly footprints to other places--cottages, farms, pubs, fields and streams--that still bear the imprint in some way of his short, intense, uproarious and tragic life.

Robert Burns was born in this village on Jan. 25, 1759, the eldest son of an impoverished farmer. The humble thatched cottage, now a museum, is a mile north of the haunted church.

The county is Ayrshire--green country of gentle hills, deep woods and clear streams in the southwestern corner of Scotland. (Ayr, the county seat, is 33 miles from Glasgow and 73 from Edinburgh.)

With its scenic charms and ubiquitous bed and breakfasts, Ayrshire is a fine place to get away from it all. Except that right here, in the district of Kyle, you never quite get away from Robert Burns. Not that anyone wants to; he is precisely the reason why so many visitors come here from all over the world.

Within hours of arriving in Burns country you can see the poet quite clearly with your eyes closed. That darkly handsome face is hard to avoid; it gazes at you from the wall of every pub and from crockery, dish towels and hearth rugs in every gift shop.

But he is more than just a one-man tourist industry, more than every Scot’s favorite dead poet. Two centuries after his death he is more loved and revered locally than any living celebrity. When I asked questions about him, the mere mention of his name was usually enough for the traditional Scots restraint to begin to evaporate. Eyes light up, tongues loosen.

Alec Agnew, whom I spoke to at the Alloway Monument across from the church, had a typical viewpoint: “An awful wild man at times,” he admitted. “But aren’t we all occasionally?”

Agnew, 41, retired after 20 years in the Glasgow police force, has been a self-described “Burns nut” all his life. As a child he won a national contest by reciting “The Two Dogs,” a poem of more than 250 lines. His job as supervisor at the Monument gives him plenty of opportunity to talk about his obsession and to quote flawlessly, and with great relish, hundreds of lines of Burns, including, of course, “Tam o’ Shanter.”

“The attraction of Burns,” Agnew explained, “is that he is us. Everyman. With all our faults and virtues. You can open his works at any page and find something about yourself.”

George Bernard Shaw was as admiring and as forgiving. He wrote that Burns “had the Scottish gift for making his vices more amiable than other people’s virtues.”

Scots slip easily into the present tense when talking about their national poet. At times the sense of Robert Burns as a living presence hereabouts is uncanny. In the collective Ayrshire mind, “ oor Robbie” is still around somewhere, steering a plow, leaning at a bar or flirting with a lassie down some country lane.

Yule Lithgow, aged 65, lives in tiny Tarbolton, where Burns started a “Bachelors’ Club” and learned how to dance. He thinks of Burns as a neighbor.

“He’s very much alive to me,” Lithgow said. “I walk the same streets, see the same places he wrote about, speak the same language. Burns is a part of this whole area and always will be.”

Gen. George Custer and Abraham Lincoln read Burns avidly. Ralph Waldo Emerson praised him lavishly. Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was strongly influenced (to put it politely) by “Tam o’ Shanter.”

Knowingly or not, virtually every adult American quotes Burns at least once a year when they sing his song “Auld Lang Syne.”

Burns is arguably the most celebrated poet the world has ever known. Yet he was shamefully neglected in his lifetime, dying in 1796 at the age of 37.

All of Burns’ genius and hard work were not enough to break the trap of poverty that ruined his health. Death transformed the legend of Burns into an instant cottage industry. Lovers of literature began flocking to Ayrshire to take the “Burns Tour.”

They still do.

Today the Scottish Tourist Board promotes the “Burns Heritage Trail.” From its headquarters in Edinburgh the board supplies--free--maps and brochures for guiding visitors around Burns country.

Guided bus tours are also available locally, and from companies based in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Ayrshire is not a large county; the two extremes of the tour--Alloway and Dumfries (where Burns is buried)--are only 60 miles apart. But even the hardiest Burnsians balk at tackling the whole tour at one time.

The poet’s footsteps can lead you through hundreds of miles of country roads to dozens of small museums, exposing you to many beautiful views.

The village of Alloway is a perfect place to start exploring. Several important sites are within walking or driving distance.

Across the street from “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk” is the Alloway Monument. The lovely “banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon” lie a few hundred yards south. Spanning the river is old Doon Bridge, over which the hapless Tam escaped the vengeful witches.

Halfway between the bridge and the church, flanked by Tam’s escape route on one side and the limpid river on the other, is the Burns Monument Hotel. Emblazoned above the main entrance are a holly bush and a shepherd’s pipe: the coat of arms Burns designed for himself.

This fine Tudor-style building has been a base camp for Burns hunters since 1827. Its ambience has no surprises. The reception area is carpeted in tartan and engravings of Burns scenes are everywhere.

The Scots call the hours between sundown and dark “the gloaming,” and no other word suits it better. The dusk deepens gradually, stealthily, into a darkness that, even at midnight, is never black.

The gloaming has a way of confusing the internal clock, and not just for the jet-lagged. Long after sunset a thrush was still singing in the tree above the roofless church. Bats flickered against a violet sky. The soft radiance illuminated the inscriptions on the headstones, some dating from the 16th Century.

Facing the iron entrance gate is a large but not ostentatious stone marker where the parents of Robert Burns--William Burnes (the “e” was dropped when Robert was a child) and Agnes Broun--lie buried.

Robert was often at odds with his father. He loved to dally with the village lassies, cutting a dashing figure with a showy plaid on one shoulder and his hair tied back with a ribbon.

Robert spoke of his father with loving respect. On the obverse of William Burnes’ tombstone is the epitaph that his son wrote for him:

“The friend of man, to vice alone a foe;

For even his failings lean’d to virtue’s side.”

The roofless church at Alloway is a mere shell with small, oddly placed windows and a modest campanile. The interior is closed off by stout iron gates. Peering into the mossy gloom you’ll see two iron catafalques, looking like medieval beds of torture, and above them a small, deeply cut window.

Here is certainly the most famous window seat in literature--the “winnock bunker,” in which the devil himself perched, playing the bagpipes for the dancing witches in “Tam o’ Shanter.”

As night fell slowly in Alloway churchyard I was half hoping to feel some kind of spooky tingle. I was alone but for the bats, owls and the serried ranks of the dead. Then I noticed a strange quality to the light around the church. The darker it grew, the more lurid the lights became.

The distance from the church to the bridge is roughly 200 yards. Tam’s route is easily traced. I walked back toward the hotel and turned left just before it. Rising majestically above the trees on the left is something that neither Tam nor Burns ever saw: the Alloway Monument, a three-sided, domed edifice in the Greek Style opened as a permanent memorial in 1823.

The Monument maintains a small Burns museum where you can see originals of many poems and love letters he wrote.

The beautifully maintained gardens contain statues of “Tam o’ Shanter” and his best friend “Souter Johnnie.”

The road that leads past the Monument is Greenfield Road--constructed by the poet’s father. It parallels the river for a hundred yards or so before reaching the old bridge of Doon.

Tam’s eagerness to reach the bridge was understandable. It is a “universally known fact,” wrote Burns in a letter, “that no diabolical power can pursue you across a runing stream.”

The old bridge has been restored to its original cobbled state. You can stand on the very spot, above the keystone, where the witch with the cutty sark caught the old mare by the tail.

Burns finished his poem with an admonition that was surely directed at himself.

“Whene’er to drink you are inclin’d

or Cutty-sarks rin in your mind

Think! ye may buy the joys o’er dear

Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s meare.”

When you are leaning over the bridge wall with Kirk Alloway glowing in the trees, the words have an intimacy and freshness, as if written yesterday and spoken by a good friend. It’s as if the author was leaning over the wall beside you, enjoying with you the dark blue of a Scottish midnight.

To get to Alloway from Glasgow, take the A77 South to Ayr, then the B7024 Ayr/Maybole road. Alloway is virtually a suburb of Ayr.

Burns country has thousands of havens for the weary traveler, ranging from converted country mansions to farmhouse bed and breakfasts. In the countryside, it seems that every second farmhouse displays a B&B; sign.

Farmhouse B&Bs; are an experience not to be missed. The hosts are almost always charming, and your breakfast menu of bacon, eggs and fresh milk often originates no more than a few yards from the dining room.

The Burns Monument Hotel is the only hotel in Alloway proper. It’s a short walk from Kirk-Alloway, the Burns Monument and the old Brig o’ Doon. Burns Cottage is a mile and a half up the road.

The hotel has nine rooms. Prices are per-person, breakfast included, and range from 28 to 48. If you stay from four to seven days, the price goes down 10%. Stay longer than eight days and you get a reduction of 20%. The hotel’s food is excellent.

Burns Monument Hotel, Alloway, Ayr, KA7 1DU. Host: Robert Glamour.

The Burns Monument Hotel has a sister hotel one mile away, the Pickwick Hotel, 19 Racecourse Road, Ayr, KA7 2TD. Hosts: Sandy and Sheila Troup. Fifteen rooms. Prices range from $35 to $55 U.S. per person, breakfast included.

There are many other high-quality accommodations in the area around Ayr. Most of the larger hotels are converted country houses, many of them hundreds of years old.

For a brochure listing dozens of hotels, guest houses and B&Bs; in Burns country, write Ayrshire and Burns Country Tourist Board, 39 Sandgate, AYR, Scotland.

The ABCTB recommends:

--Carrick Lodge Hotel, 46 Carrick Road, Ayr, KA7 2RE. Hosts: Siohan and Patrick Magee. Eight rooms, all with private bathrooms. Prices for B&B; range from 22.50 to 32.

--Chestnuts Hotel, 52 Racecourse Road, Ayr, KA7 2UZ. Your host: Mrs. Corinne Bender. Fourteen room. B&B; prices: 22.50 to 28.50. Weekly rates: 175 to 185.

--Fort Lodge Hotel, 2 Citadel Place, Ayr, KA7 1JN. Seven rooms, all with private bathrooms. B&B; prices: 20 to 30 per person. Weekly rates: 180 to 200.

One of the few modern hotels in the area is the Horizon Hotel, Esplanade, Ayr, KA7 1DT. Hosts: Mr. and Mrs. Jean Meikle. Seven rooms, all with bathrooms. B&B; prices: 20 to 31. Weekly rates: 180 to 200.

Guest houses are smaller hotels and less expensive:

--Dargil Guest Hotel, 7 Queens Terre, Ayr, KA7 1DU. Host: Mrs. Helen Guthrie. Four rooms, two public bathrooms. B&B; rates from 10 to 14. Weekly rates: 85 to 90.

--Donbar Guest House, 5 Queens Terrace, Ayr, KA7 1DU. Your host: Mrs. Joyce Meek. Four rooms, two public bathrooms. Prices: from 10 to 14. Weekly rates: 85 to 95.

--Mr. and Mrs. H.W. Anton, Clyde Cottage, 1 Arran Terrace, Ayr, KA7 1JF. Three rooms, two public. B&B; rates from 10 to 14. Weekly rates: 90 to 95.

The poor reputation of English cooking does not extend across the border into Scotland. Fresh local produce and centuries of cultural contact with France ensure that dining in Scotland can be a satisfying and civilized experience.

Ayr offers a wide variety of cuisines. Most major hotels have good restaurants. Farmhouse breakfasts are justly famous. Fish-and-chip shops are everywhere, as are a startling number of East Indian restaurants. As a rule, avoid Chinese restaurants unless you are starving.

If you want the true Burnsian feeling, The Stables Restaurant, Queens Court, 41 Sandgate, Ayr, offers the kind of food that the Bard himself might have eaten--dishes inspired by 17th- and 18th-Century recipes.

Specialties include roast lamb with rowan and rosemary, venison and juniper pie, fresh Doon salmon and a number of items that must be tasted even to be understood, including Rumbledethumps, Cranachan, Hramsa and Dunsyre blue.

Another restaurant famous for local cooking is Fouters Bistro, 2A Academy St., Ayr, offering Scottish produce cooked in the French style. Fish comes direct from Ayr harbor. Charbroiled beef is from Aberdeen Angus cattle, and guinea fowl and duck are locally reared.

For more information about the Burns Heritage Trail, contact the Scottish Tourist Board, 23 Ravelston Terrace, Edinburgh EH4 3EU. For details on accommodations, write to the Burns Monument Hotel, Alloway, Ayr, Scotland.

For general information on travel to Great Britain, contact the British Tourist Authority, 350 S. Figueroa St., Suite 450, Los Angeles 90071, (213) 628-3525.