It's not hard to find Burns-related travel destinations when you visit Scotland, but actor/author and Burns expert John Cairney wants to shake up and re-invigorate the established Burns highlights. This book is designed to offer new ways of connecting paths around Scotland with the life of the bard.
If you're inclined to orient your next trip to Scotland around Robert Burns-related sites, this book will help. Cairney follows Burns around the country on various trips, meeting with professors and occasionally clergy, singing, taking walking tours, sharing tea with friends. Cairney's book gives a lively account of how Burns took his passion for poetry and politics with him in his travels.
As Cairney points out, as he achieved success with his writing, Burns became something of a tourist attraction himself on his farm in Dumfries, even while he was alive.
Cairney's book functions as a Burns biography that's focused on places -- with sections focusing on Edinburgh, the Highlands, the Borders, the building of Burns farm and more. To Cairney, Burns' introduction to books, to girls and poetry, to Edinburgh, to society and fame, to the theater and the needs of his family, to song and his place in posterity -- each of these phases is tied to specific places.
158-page paperback.
