Photo: Doonholm Estate, Ayrshire. Image by Mary and Angus Hogg
Robert was 7 years old when the Burnes family moved to Mount Oliphant. His father William leased the farm and borrowed money to buy livestock. As Robert later said, ‘the farm proved a ruinous bargain’.
At Whitsun 1766 William Burnes moved his family into Mount Oliphant. He hoped to earn a good living from the farm’s 70 acres and took a loan of £100 to buy livestock. The rent was £40 a year for the first six years and £45 thereafter. Robert’s brother Gilbert would later say that the soil at Mount Oliphant was the ‘very poorest’ he knew of.
The family struggled to make ends meet on the farm. Robert and Gilbert worked alongside their father in the fields. Some of the cattle died in accidents and from disease. Robert tilled the earth with a hand plough and learned to thresh the corn. By the time he was 15 years old Robert did most of the hardest work on the farm. He remembered working like ‘a galley-slave’.
It was traditional to pair a boy and girl to bring in the harvest each year. Gilbert noted that Robert was ‘bashful and awkward’ with girls when he was young. One year Robert was paired with Nellie Kilpatrick. Nellie would sing as they worked in the fields. At the end of the day Robert would carefully pick the nettle stings and thistles from her hands.
Nellie Kilpatrick became Robert’s first love. She was a miller’s daughter a year younger than Robert. He later said she was a ‘bewitching creature’, a ‘bonie, sweet, sonsie lass’.
Robert never told Nell that he loved her. She raised a ‘certain delicious passion’ in him, made his ‘heart-strings thrill’ and inspired the young Burns to compose his first song, ‘O, once I lov'd a bonnie lass’. As Robert said, it was due to Handsome Nell that he ‘first committed the sin of rhyme’ and ‘Thus with me began Love and Poesy.’
O, once I lov'd a bonnie lass,
Ay, and I love her still;
And, whilst that virtue warms my breast
I'll love my handsome Nell.As bonnie lasses I hae seen,
And mony full as braw;
But for a modest gracefu' mien,
The like I never saw.A bonnie lass, I will confess,
Is pleasant to the e'e,
But without some better qualities,
She's no a lass for me.But Nelly's looks are blythe and sweet,
And what is best of a' -
Her reputation is complete,
And fair without a flaw.She dresses aye sae clean and neat,
Baith decent and genteel:
An' then there's something in her gait
Gars ony dress look weel.A gaudy dress and gentle air
May slightly touch the heart;
But it's innocence and modesty
That polishes the dart.'T is this in Nelly pleases me,
'T is this enchants my soul!
For absolutely in my breast
She reigns without control.
Looking back on his early life, Robert wrote about his first song and his first love:
There is certainly some connection between Love, and Music and Poetry…
For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning Poet till I got once heartily in
Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart…...my heart glowed with honest warm simplicity; unacquainted and uncorrupted with the ways of a wicked world.
The performance is indeed, very puerile and silly; but I am always pleased with it, as it recals to my mind those happy days when my heart was yet honest, and my tongue was sincere.
The subject of it was a young girl who really deserved all the praises I have bestowed on her. I not only had this opinion of Her then - but I actually think so still, now that the spell is long since broken, and the inchantment at an end.
After many years of back-breaking work and hardship William Burnes gave up the lease on Mount Oliphant and moved his family to Lochlea Farm.
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