The home of Robert Burns' Auld Lang Syne is a national treasure. We must not lose it
Auld Lang Syne is the closest thing the world has to a shared anthem. The farm steading where Robert Burns wrote it and scores of other poems and songs must be saved
Every year at Hogmanay, Scotland gives the world a song. Auld Lang Syne, however, is more than a musical moment following the bells. It is a collective act of remembrance.
Hands are clasped, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes with great tenderness. Voices rise, not always in tune, to belt out the closest thing the world has to a shared anthem. In Sydney, New York, Edinburgh, London and Tokyo, and millions of points in between, humanity will sing of friendship, memory, love, loss and endurance.
Auld Lang Syne was written in the 18th century but is stamped on our contemporary culture. It closes films such as It’s a Wonderful Life and When Harry Met Sally. It also closes Japanese department stores, telling shoppers it’s time to go home.
In terms of Scotland’s exports, Auld Lang Syne rivals whisky, golf and tartan, and is the most sung song globally after Happy Birthday. Yet we rarely stop to ask where it came from, or what that should mean to us.
Reworking an older lyric
Robert Burns gifted it to the world in 1788, while living at Ellisland Farm, on the banks of the River Nith. The unchanged steading in Dumfries and Galloway is the only home Burns built and is by far the best preserved and most authentic. You can walk in his footsteps in the farm’s 140 acres. The field layout he created remains, as do his paths and woodland walks.
Burns wrote 130 poems and songs there, despite toiling to build the farm and make the thin soil productive. Work produced includes Tam o’ Shanter, My Heart’s in the Highlands, Banks of Doon, and A Parcel of Rogues.
Auld Lang Syne is a reworking of an older lyric using an existing tune. At Ellisland, Burns contributed to The Scots Musical Museum, which aimed to revitalise and preserve the oral culture of the country he loved.
READ MORE: The night that Robert Burns' skull – with hair still attached – was taken from his Scottish crypt
The earlier 1711 ballad was a standard love song: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot/ And never thought upon/ The flames of love extinguished/ And freely past and gone.”
Burns’ version speaks to the concerns of an 18th-century audience, particularly emigration and parting. He also introduced “auld lang syne”, a Scots phrase he loved.
It first appeared in a letter to his friend Frances Dunlop, who had shared with him the comfort she found in the company of friends after a bereavement. By transforming it into an anthem of friendship, Burns ensured its immortality.
Scotland’s Mozart
But do we use it to our best advantage? We speak often about cultural exports, national branding and soft power. Yet when it comes to Burns, we are oddly hesitant to promote the living culture he gave the world.
In 2019, Professor Murray Pittock of the University of Glasgow published a paper called Robert Burns and the Scottish Economy. He found Burns generates £203 million annually and adds a further £139m to our national brand value. But the potential is far greater.
He compared Burns to Mozart. Austria invests heavily in his legacy and the benefits run into billions. Burns, by contrast, is largely left to fend for himself.
An app developed by the Scottish Government for Homecoming 2009, for example, is now unsupported. There is no coherent, funded, national Burns tourism strategy. Burns Scotland, the organisation formed to bring together the custodians of his collections across the country, receives no public funding. No major Burns site is run by the state, being left to charities and hard-pressed councils.
Fifteen years ago, the Scottish Government invested £21m in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway, now run by the National Trust for Scotland. It was the right decision and a successful one. But Burns’ legacy does not stop at the place where he was born and lived until the age of nine.
Serious decay
Ellisland was the home he created himself for his new bride, Jean Armour. He was at the peak of his creative powers, despite being just 29 when he arrived.
But the site is fragile. The Robert Burns Ellisland Trust was formed in 2020 to save it. Specialist reports reveal serious decay threatening the buildings and Burns’ artefacts, including poems in his own hand.
Funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, South of Scotland Enterprise and others has helped develop initial plans to restore the site. A design team led by Collective Architecture will submit planning proposals in early 2026. A robust business plan aims to ensure the site is sustainable, generating income from visitor accommodation to safeguard the heritage.
It offers a unique opportunity to visitors from across the world, to stay on the only farm Burns built. This will include residencies for artists and writers. The barn he built will be a performance space, reflecting the focus on song-writing in Burns’ Ellisland years. ‘Conservation through use’ is the principle guiding the restoration. The cottage known to Burns, which currently houses staff, will be returned to its 1788 state.
A masterpiece
The development phase also supports an international fundraising campaign, called Saving the Home of Auld Lang Syne. Current estimates suggest the cost of saving Ellisland is £12m.
That figure can sound large in isolation, but it is a fraction of the £80m cost of the V&A Dundee. The Burrell Renaissance Project cost £68.25m. More than a decade ago, it cost £45m to acquire the Titian painting Diana and Callisto for the nation.
The Titian is of course a masterpiece. But so, I would argue, is Auld Lang Syne, and one that reaches many more people.
Joan McAlpine is project director of The Robert Burns Ellisland Trust. For information about Saving the Home of Auld Lang Syne go to www.ellislandfarm.co.uk
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