A NEW Farmhouse in Time exhibition at Ellisland will tells tales of soldiers and thieves who lived in the poet’s house
It will be staged in the byre that Burns built and reveal the lives of those who followed him, including doctors and dairymaids.
Beyond Burns: Ellisland’s People will preview to the public this weekend and feature new information about the farm near Dumfries, as well as striking archive images from the coming of electricity in 1956, which was celebrated with a special play and pageant, above.
New discoveries include material about a teenage servant who was jailed for theft, and a ploughman who survived the Crimean War, as well as generations of local tenant farming families who toiled on the land after Burns’s departure in 1791.
Archive film offers a glimpse of life in the 1950s and there are oral history recordings of people who lived at Ellisland or have helped preserve the legacy of the place where Burns wrote Auld Lang Syne and Tam o Shanter.
Joan McAlpine, project director of the Robert Burns Ellisland Trust, said: “This is our first temporary exhibition and another milestone in the trust’s work to engage new audiences.”
Museum officer Adam Dickson added: “Ellisland is best known as the farm built by the poet himself. But it was also home to hundreds of other working people whose stories are untold till now. This exhibition will shed some light on their lives of toil, as well as recording the brighter moments when local people worked together to safeguard one of Scotland’s most important sites.”
The exhibition will open on September 7 and 8 when it will be free. After that, it will open from Wednesday to Saturday from 11 am till 4 pm until 31 October. The cost, which includes entry to the main museum, is £6 per adult. Children are free in 2024.
