Special ceremony at Fountain Gardens will salute the Bard
Burns Club members will lay wreath of red roses
13.07.2018 Members of the Renfrewshire Association of Burns Clubs are invited to remember the Bard at a special wreath- laying ceremony.
Robert Burns died in 1796 at the age of just 37, and the more than 200th anniversary of this occasion will be marked at the stunning statue of the poet in Paisley’s Fountain Gardens.
The statue was sculpted by F W Pomeroy and was erected in 1896. It is generally considered to be the best statue of Burns in existence.
It was funded mainly by the open-air concerts given by the members of the Tannahill Choir, named after Burns’s fellow poet and Paisley man.
These concerts, which took place in the Glenfield Estate at the foot of the Paisley’s Gleniffer Braes, were the social events of the year in the town.
As many as 700 voices would sing Scots songs to an enormous audience of around 30,000 concert-goers, and the audiences were much the same at the Burns statue series, where around 400 choristers would sing to an audience of around 20,000.
There are around 300 members who make up the Renfrewshire Association of Burns Clubs and all of them are invited to the Fountain Gardens on Thursday, July 26, at 7pm.
“We will be laying a wreath of red roses,” said the association secretary George Grant.
“The association’s members are invited, and we are hoping the provost will be there too.”
Paisley has strong associations with Robert Burns.
Jean Armour, the woman who was to become the poet’s wife, was sent to stay there by her uncle when she was expecting her first baby.
Many of Burns’s closest friends and supporters lived in the area.
These included the Earl of Glencairn, subject of the famous “Lament”, who lived nearby at Finlaystone House in Langbank.
Alexander Pattison was called ‘ The Bookseller’ by Burns after he sold 92 copies of his 1787 Edinburgh edition of poems to local people.
Wilhelmina Alexander was ‘The Bonnie Lass O’ Ballochmyle’, and she was born and lived for over 30 years at Newton House in Elderslie.
Burns himself visited Paisley in 1787 and 1788.