How and why

The name

Standard surname scholarship on Burns, Burn, Burnes and Burness, including the early Yorkshire attestation and the Kincardineshire distribution of the Burness form. The 1786 change of spelling by Robert and Gilbert is recorded in the standard biographies.

Clan, sept and heraldry

The Court of the Lord Lyon, Scotland's heraldic authority, on chiefship, grants of arms to individuals rather than surnames, and the function of crest badges. The Campbell sept claim and the Loudoun allegiance explanation come from published clan histories. Those histories disagree with each other, and that disagreement is the finding.

The tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans for the status of the Burns Check and its succession by the Burns Heritage Check and Burns Heritage Tartan, and Burns Federation material for the 1959 design story: the rejected Campbell basis, the Shepherd's Check ground, the hodden grey overcheck, the two green lines, the discarded name "Ayr tartan", and the June 1959 acceptance on condition of Scottish manufacture. The swatch on that page is drawn in CSS from the described sett. It is a sketch of the sett rather than a reproduction of the cloth, and it says so on the page.

The family

Parish register dates for William Burnes, Agnes Broun and their seven children, and the standard record of the nine children of Robert Burns and Jean Armour. Maxwell Burns's birth on the day of his father's funeral, and Jean's consequent absence from it, are well attested. William Nicol Burns's career and childlessness and James Glencairn Burns's daughters are recorded.

Burns Night

The date and shape of the first supper, nine men of Ayr at the cottage in Alloway on 21 July 1801 on the fifth anniversary of his death, are recorded by the National Trust for Scotland, who own the cottage, and are not in dispute. The point that it was held on the wrong anniversary and moved to January later is worth knowing before anyone tells you the format is ancient and fixed. For finding a supper today, the interactive map from the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow is the only serious survey there is, and I have linked it for what it is: research into more than 2,500 suppers that have already happened, not a list of tickets on sale.

The poems

Texts and the Scots glossary both come from the Project Gutenberg edition of Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, taken verbatim by script rather than retyped by hand. Robert Burns died in 1796, so everything he wrote has been out of copyright everywhere for well over a century.

This list is the point of the site, so it gets a page instead of a footnote.

• The Campbell sept connection. Genuinely unresolved. Several incompatible explanations exist and the Loudoun allegiance one is only the most plausible, not the proven one.
• The warrior etymology. Dismissed here in favour of the stream. That is the mainstream view but it is not unanimous.
• The 1788 twins. Counted differently in different accounts. That is why the nine children add up slightly differently depending on which book you have.
• The Scots glosses. These are matched by script against the glossary Burns's own editions carried, which means a word with two senses can occasionally be given the wrong one. Obvious traps are excluded by hand and a few entries are corrected outright, but if you find a gloss that is wrong in context, it is a bug and I would like to know.
• Death dates for Agnes and Annabella Burnes. Not included. Sources disagree, and I would rather leave a gap than print the wrong year.

Astro, built to static files, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. No tracking, no cookies, no analytics, no fonts loaded from anybody else's server, and one small script whose only job is to show you what a Scots word means when you tap it.

One page is an exception, and it is fair that you know before you click it. Books and things carries Amazon links that pay me a commission, and it says so at the top. They are ordinary links rather than Amazon's own embeds, so nothing above stops being true on that page: no script of theirs runs here and no cookie is set until you leave. What Amazon then does at their end is between you and Amazon. The list of things I will not link is longer than the list I will, and that is the part of the page worth reading.

The 13 poems come to 569 lines carrying 342 glossed words between them, all generated from the source edition by a script in the repository, so the texts can be rebuilt identically and checked against the original.

The type

Fraunces for display and Spectral for reading and for verse. Both are open-licence faces, self-hosted.

The colours, and the thread

The palette is the Burns Check taken out of the weave and used as ink: undyed oatmeal for the page, an iron-gall near-black with a blue cast for the text, bottle green for links, slate for metadata, and one wax-seal red that I use as little as possible.

The rule under every page title is the site's one recurring device: the Burns Check unwoven back into a single warp thread, the fine dark and light of the shepherd's check crossed at intervals by the hodden grey and its two greens.

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There is deliberately no tartan anywhere else. It appears once, on its own page, where you actually want to see it.