In 1165, Walter fitz Alan, Steward of Scotland, granted land here to the Cistercian monks of Melrose. The monks built an abbey whose ruins still stand, now known as Hunters Tower or Mauchline Castle. James IV elevated the place to a burgh of barony in 1510 and granted a further charter in 1610. Both documents are gone - believed lost in a 17th-century fire at Register House in Edinburgh, the kind of administrative catastrophe that leaves a town with nothing to wave at outsiders who doubt its pedigree. A ley tunnel is said to run from Mauchline Castle to that of Kingencleugh, though no one has produced it. Nennius, the 9th-century Welsh monk, listed a wondrous 'Mauchline Quern' among the thirteen wonders of Britain - a magical millstone that ground constantly, except on Sundays, and could be heard working underground.

Reverend George Young, Mauchline's minister, signed the Covenant in Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh in 1633 and subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant ten years later. The Battle of Mauchline Muir was fought here in 1648 between two rival Covenanter factions - the Engagers and the Kirk party; a flag from that battle still hangs in the church, having also been carried at Drumclog and Bothwell Brig. In 1684 a Covenanter named James Smith, wounded in a skirmish at Burn of Ann in Kyle, was brought to Mauchline and died in prison. The following year, five men were dragged from their homes and executed at the loan - a green strip of common ground where the gallows were set up. The original monument over their grave was removed in 1861 and built into the wall of the school shed, where it remains.

Three trades made Mauchline. At the turn of the 19th century over 200 men worked the sandstone quarry; as many as sixty wagons a day ran from the siding, carrying stone to buildings all over the West of Scotland and as far as America. After 1918, demand collapsed as bricks took over, and the last quarry shut in the 1950s. The firm of W & A Smith produced Mauchline ware - small wooden boxes and vases of polished sycamore, transfer-printed with scenes from across the British Isles and beyond - from the 1820s until a fire in 1933 ended production for good. Tartan ware came from a Smith-invented machine that wove tartan patterns onto paper; fernware, introduced in the 1870s, used actual ferns pressed into the wood before stippling. And then there are the curling stones. Kays of Scotland still makes them in Mauchline, the only such factory in the world, sending out the polished granite hearts that slide across Olympic ice.

Burns is not buried at Mauchline - he lies at Dumfries - but most of the cast he wrote about is. 'Holy Wullie' Willie Fisher, the man generally taken as the model for the pious hypocrite of Burns's most savage poem, is here. Reverend William 'Daddy' Auld, the minister Burns mocked, is here. John Richmond, James Armour, John 'Clockie' Brown the clockmaker, and Gavin Hamilton, Burns's best friend, are all here. Hamilton wanted no headstone, probably because his quarrels with the Kirk had hardened into something permanent; the plaque now marking his grave was not placed until 1919, by the Partick Burns Club. Mary Cameron, wife of the last leader of the Chartist movement George Julian Harney, rests here too. A rare morthouse - a small stone building used to deter body-snatchers - still stands at the western edge of the cemetery.

South of the town, Ballochmyle Viaduct spans the River Ayr - still the highest extant railway viaduct in Britain, its single great arch a piece of Victorian audacity in red sandstone. Burns once encountered Wilhelmina Alexander while walking the grounds of Ballochmyle estate, and the meeting produced 'The Bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle,' a song he never had the nerve to give her directly. The Mauchline railway station closed in 1965, but the Glasgow South Western Line still runs past; the nearest open station is at Auchinleck. The Holy Fair, the boisterous gathering Burns satirised, has been revived as an annual event. Horse races once ran on the road past Mossgiel from the National Burns Memorial - a tower visible from miles around, designed by William Fraser and built where the poet ploughed his most famous furrow.