Mapping the Brink of Literary History at Ellisland Farm

Abstract

This article presents new documentary evidence of the history of Ellisland farm, where Burns lived between 1788 and 1791. Its main subject is an April 1787 map of Ellisland executed by the surveyor William McCartney for the landowner Patrick Miller of Dalswinton in anticipation of what would become Burns’s tenancy. The article examines McCartney’s map alongside a later 1817 survey map and other supporting evidence, identifying temporal layers on the 1787 map that capture Burns’s activities as an improving tenant farmer at Ellisland. It further positions the 1787 map within the memorialisation and literary tourism that evolved around Burns in the nineteenth century.