MS832 Robert Burns manuscripts

Angus Archives holds two items associated with Scotland’s best known poet, Robert Burns. The manuscripts are a written copy of the poem The Deils Awa with the Excise Man, and a letter written about keeping an appointment. The poem was donated to Arbroath’s Museum Society in the 1880s by David Ramsay of the Arbroath Guide. The contents of the museum were later gifted to the town council & its successors. Nothing is known of how it came into the hands of Mr Ramsay. The letter written by Burns to Mr Kennedy in 1786 is believed to have been donated by Alexander Hutcheson, also in the 1880s.

In the early twentieth century the Library Committee deemed the manuscripts too precious to handle or exhibit and put them into a bank vault for safe keeping. The letters were put on display in Arbroath Library for many years but were later transferred to Angus Archives.

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