Place-name scholars have argued over Tarbolton for centuries, and the records are not on anyone's side. The 1138 form Torbolten suggests Old English torr ('hill') with boðl-tun ('village with buildings'), making the name a cousin of Bolton in Greater Manchester. A 1209 spelling, Torballtone, hints instead at torr plus bāll ('field'), with tun ('farm'). A third reading - Torbalyrtune in 1148 - points to Old Gaelic tòrr plus baile ('village'), with Anglo-Saxon settlers later layering on tun without realising they were saying the same thing twice. The village sits below Hood's Hill, also called Tarbolton Motte, an earthwork from a much older world. Whatever its name once meant, the hill remains the obvious answer.

The Bachelors' Club was Burns's first formal venture into the world of ideas. The rules required members to be unmarried and bound them to debate one question each meeting - usually something to do with love, marriage, or the conduct of young men. Burns also attended dancing classes here against his father's wishes, and learned Freemasonry at Lodge St James in the same building. The cottage is now a museum, preserved by the National Trust for Scotland, with the small upstairs room set out as it might have been on a debate night - benches along the walls, rush lights, the smell of tallow. The Old Fail Monastery, once a powerful Trinitarian house, stood a short way from the village at the hamlet of Fail, near Fail Toll; the loch beside it has dwindled to wet ground that floods in winter.

Among those who shaped Burns's life in Tarbolton was Elizabeth Paton, born here around 1760. She was a servant in the Burns family household and the mother of his first child, Elizabeth Paton Burns, born in 1785. Burns acknowledged the daughter and wrote a 'Welcome to a Bastart Wean' addressed to her - a poem of unguarded tenderness that ignored the disapproval of the Kirk. Paton's life was not the romance later biographers sometimes made of it; she was a young working woman whose circumstances were transformed and complicated by Burns's regard. The relationship ended before Burns settled with Jean Armour, but the child remained part of the family. Tarbolton remembers her as a person, not as a footnote to a poet.

Tarbolton has produced a surprising number of professional footballers for a place its size. James Allan, born here in 1857, emigrated to Sunderland and founded Sunderland A.F.C. in 1879. Jimmy Hay, born 1881, captained and managed Celtic. Tommy Gemmell, a St Mirren inside forward who played through the 1950s, was born here in 1930 - not to be confused with the Celtic full-back of the same name who scored in the 1967 European Cup final, but born in Motherwell. Kris Boyd, who topped the Scottish Premier League scoring charts more than once for Rangers and Kilmarnock, was born in 1983. The village also gave Britain John 'Mighty Mouse' McLauchlan, the British and Irish Lions prop, and Jai McDowall, who won Britain's Got Talent in 2011. Tarbolton Primary's house system - Fail, Afton, Coyle, Montgomery - is named for the streams and estates that surround the village, the same waters Burns once walked between.

Today Tarbolton has a school, a church, a gospel hall, two pubs and a bowling club - the modest furniture of a village that has stayed roughly the same size for generations. The railway station closed long ago. Nearby Old Montgomery Castle, also known as Coilsfield House, was where one of Burns's loves worked - Mary Campbell, the 'Highland Mary' of his most haunted poems. The Bachelors' Club museum opens to visitors in season; standing in that upstairs room, surrounded by the same plastered walls Burns leaned against, it is easy to understand why a young farmer's son with an unsteady future thought a debating society might give shape to his thoughts. He was not yet anyone in particular when he climbed those stairs. By the time he came down for good, he had begun to become himself.