Fair fa’……..Naw!

Burns night tonight and I caved in and got the new haggis on offer. A chocolate one. I’m not sure that was the puddin’ the Bard had in mind when writing his address to a haggis. Don’t get me wrong. It was a good chocolate, albeit a bit claggy and cloying, and in its own right OK. But the pantomime of trying to retain the haggis shape was a bit of a gimmick.

Burns wrote the Address to a Haggis in 1786. He moved to Dumfries in 1788 and then became an excise officer. There are various stories over where he wrote Scots Wha Hae in 1793.
One location where he is said to have drafted it is the Murray Arms at Gatehouse of Fleet, then an inn just a mile from the farm house where our son has confirmed the clock in yesterday’s photo lived for many years. The clock was registered in 1770.

Who knows if Burns heard it chime on one of his walks!

We do know Sir Winston Churchill will have heard it as he signed the visitors book in the house where it ended up in the 1950s in West Sussex. As will the now King Charles III and his late father Prince Philip who also signed the visitors book.