A Perthshire hotel has become a place of pilgrimage for Robert Burns fans from across the globe, thanks to a scribbling by the Bard on the wall.
The poem is etched on the chimney breast of the Kenmore Hotel.
While Burns’ Cottage at Alloway, Burns’ house in Dumfries and Ellisland farm are all attractions for fans of the Bard, the bar at the hotel is also a popular stop-off.
Although protected by a perspex screen, poetry-lovers can see the writing – penned in 1787 when he visited the area as it was when Burns originally wrote it.
Ross McEwen, general manager at the Kenmore Hotel, said: “It’s a large feature of the Kenmore Hotel. People come from all over the world to have their picture taken by the fireplace it’s a firm favourite with people. Poet’s is the hotel bar so people sometimes stumble across it as well.
“It’s a place of pilgrimage especially to Burns enthusiasts. We get a lot of people from America, as well as Scotland, coming just to have a look at it. And it’s not just residents (of the hotel) it’s people who are passing.
“For ourselves it’s of huge magnitude it’s never been done in any other hotel that we know of. It couples really well with the history of the building it’s Scotland’s oldest inn, dating back to 1572, and it was 1787 that the poem was inscribed on the wall.”
The hotel will host one of hundreds of Burns suppers tonight.
Born on January 25 1759 in Alloway, Ayrshire, Burns published the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems in July 1786 as a means of raising funds for a passage to the West Indies but abandoned the plans after its success.
A year later, at the age of 28, Burns travelled to Highland Perthshire composing The Birks of Aberfeldy and The Braes of Killiecrankie about the region and meeting fiddler Niel Gow.