Ellisland, a small farm in Dunscore parish, Dumfriesshire, on the right bank of the broad, wooded Nith, 5 ¾ miles NNW of Dumfries and 2 ½ SSE of Auldgirth station. Extending to 170 acres, it was rented for £50 a year by Robert Burns (1759-96) from Whitsunday 1788 to December 1791, his landlord being Mr Patrick Miller of Dalswinton. A new five-roomed house was built; the farm has a kindly soil, its holmland portion loamy and rich; and its walks by the river-side command fair views of Friars Carse, Dalswinton, and Cowhill Tower. So here Burns set himself to work the ground, till in the autumn of 1789 he was appointed a gauger, with a salary of £50, when Ellisland was made a dairy rather than an arable farm, with from nine to twelve cows, three to five horses (` Pegasus ' or ` Peg Nicholson ' among them), and several pet sheep. Things prospered not, and the close of the third year saw him forced to remove to Dumfries and bid farewell to pleasant Ellisland, ` leaving nothing there, ' says Allan Cunningham, ` but a putting-stone, with which he loved to exercise his strength, a memory of his musings that can never die, and £300 of his money sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all had augured happiness.' Yet was the Ellisland life a fruitful one, for the world, if not for the poet, since here were written To Mary in Heaven and Tam O' Shanter.—Ord. Sur., sh. 9, 1863. See William M`Dowall's Burns in Dumfriesshire (Edinb. 1870).
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