Robert Tannahill

As he reported in a letter to a friend, "My brother Hugh and I are all that remain at home, with our old mother, bending under age and frailty; and but seven years back, nine of us used to sit down at dinner together."

Then Hugh married and Robert was left the sole support, making a resolution which he records in a touching but substandard poem in English, "The Filial Vow".

His work now began to appear in periodicals such as The Scots Magazine and in 1807 he published a small collection of poems and songs in an edition of 900 copies which sold out in a few weeks.

Out on a walk some time later, he heard a girl in a field singing his "We'll meet beside the dusky glen on yon burnside" and was greatly encouraged.

Eventually he burned all his manuscripts and apparently drowned himself in a culverted stream under the Paisley Canal, where he was found because he had left his jacket and watch at the mouth of the tunnel.

[3] However, in 2024 research conducted by Paisley Museum and Dr Moira Hansen from the Open University cast doubt on the belief that he deliberately took his own life.

Using both Scots and English, he experimented with many forms: tales, fables, epitaphs, verse epistles, odes, besides the body of dialect song on which his reputation mainly rests.

Here the tartan-clad Genius of Scotland enters the assembly of the gods on Olympus and begs for a national bard, which is immediately granted with the birth of Burns.

The title piece was a dramatic fragment in dialect couplets, serving as frame for accompanying lyrics, of which Tannahill (but few others) thought highly.

"[8] In it he refers to a story from his nursemaid, Mary McIntyre of Balquhither parish, that she and her mother had baked bannock for the army of Charles Edward Stuart, marching to Culloden.

[9] Tannahill also wrote "Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea", the tune of which was later modified to form the music for the famous Australian bush folk song "Waltzing Matilda".

[12] The centenary of his birth was marked in 1874 by an edition of his Poems and Songs and by a procession to the Gleniffer Braes, one of the most frequently mentioned landscapes in his work, attended by 15,000 people.

The penny admission charge went towards paying for David Watson Stevenson's statue of Tannahill that was erected in the grounds of Paisley Abbey in 1883.