The Kennedys ran the place. The Marquess of Ailsa lived at Cassillis House, just outside Maybole, until the family sold the estate in 2007. The ancestral seat, Culzean Castle, sits four miles west of town on a basaltic cliff above the Firth of Clyde - a Robert Adam design from 1777, now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. Beneath the castle are the Coves of Culzean, holes in the cliff that local stories called retreats of outlaws and resorts of fairies, depending on the storyteller's preference. The Maybole Town Hall on the High Street still incorporates a tower dating back to the sixteenth century. Two miles south-west of town are the ruins of Crossraguel Abbey, founded around 1244 - Crois Riaghail, the Cross of St Regulus.

Maybole sits in the middle of Burns country. Robert Burns's mother, Agnes Brown, was a Maybole woman. The poet himself spent his seventeenth year a little further west at Kirkoswald, learning land-surveying. In the parish churchyard there lie the real men who became Burns's fictional characters: Douglas Graham, the inspiration for Tam o' Shanter, and John Davidson, the inspiration for Souter Johnnie. South of Maybole, on the coast, sit the ruins of Turnberry Castle - where Robert the Bruce is said to have been born, where boys turned into kings. The countryside around Maybole is patterned with all of this: castles, ruins, churchyards, place-names that walked out of a poem.

Maybole has produced an unlikely number of consequential people for a town its size. John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836), the engineer whose name became the word "macadam," came from here - the man who figured out that roads should be built of crushed stone laid in compacted, well-drained layers, and effectively invented modern road surfacing. Sir Gilbert Blane (1749-1834), an eighteenth-century physician, reformed naval medicine and pushed the Royal Navy to issue lemon juice against scurvy. Norris McWhirter (1925-2004), co-founder of the Guinness Book of World Records, was descended from the McWhirters of Maybole. Robert MacBryde (1913-1966) was a noted modern painter and theatre designer. Margaret McMurray, who died in 1760 on a farm called Cultezron just outside town, was one of the last native speakers of a Lowland dialect of Scottish Gaelic - a language she carried into her grave.

In the nineteenth century Maybole reinvented itself as a centre of boot and shoe manufacturing. The St Cuthbert's shoe factory employed generations of locals; its site now carries housing. The Maybole Cross - whose Moon dial on one face is a genuinely rare survival - stands in the gardens of Maybole Castle, where it ended up after being shifted around the town for centuries. The Waterboys had Maybole in mind when they wrote "Glastonbury Song" - "I dreamed myself from the sultry plains, to the old green square back in old Maybole" - a strange piece of celebrity tourism from one of the rock band's better moments. Walk the old green square today and you can stand inside the lyric, the way some places let you do.