Qualla: Irvine Burns Club

Irvine Burns Club: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 2 June 1826 - thirty years after Robert Burns's death - twelve men sat down in Milne's Inn in Irvine and agreed to form a society to commemorate the poet. Five of them had known Burns personally. Two had been close friends. The first president, Dr John Mackenzie, had attended Burns's dying father at Lochlea in 1784 and had married one of the famous "Mauchline Belles" before becoming personal physician to the Earl of Eglinton. The first vice-president, David Sillar, had been Burns's friend since their teenage years in Tarbolton. The minute they signed that day was modest. The institution they founded - now nearly two centuries old - holds six of the only known surviving manuscripts of the Kilmarnock Edition, the slim book that started everything.

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Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Irvine Burns Club: Wellwood House

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 3.0. The club is no longer based at Milne's Inn - now the Crown Inn - but at Wellwood House on Eglinton Street, a sturdy Victorian villa with a story of its own. Alexander Paterson was a banker; his son John served on the Irvine Council from 1854 and was Provost from 1873 to 1878. Joh...

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Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Irvine Burns Club: Six Kilmarnock Manuscripts

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 3.0. The club's most precious possession is a set of six original folio manuscripts that Burns sent to John Wilson, printer of Kilmarnock, for the famous Kilmarnock Edition of *Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect*, published on 31 July 1786. The six are *The Twa Dogs*, *The Holy Fa...

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Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Irvine Burns Club: A Library of Two Thousand Books

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Wellwood library holds about 2,000 volumes covering Burns works and criticism, Burnsiana, Scottish history, Ayrshire history, the complete works of John Galt (a native of Irvine), the works of James Montgomery the hymn writer (also Irvine-born), and the works of Edgar Allan P...

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Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Irvine Burns Club: Chairs, Cups, and Ceremonies

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954 Roger Griffith, Public domain. The club's collection includes the chair Burns used when visiting Templeton's bookshop in Irvine - donated in 2016 by the Gilroy family. Mrs Gilroy's account from 1930 said that Templeton's daughter, Mrs McGavin, had carefully kept the chair; when she died in 1881 it passed to he...

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Image: Rosser1954 Roger Griffith | Public domain