Museum and archive collections from Robert Burns Birthplace Museum are now available for everyone to explore online.
Whether you’re a Burns scholar, tracing your family roots to Ayrshire or wanting to find out more about Scottish music and folk traditions, the Burns Collection brings multiple layers of information about Robert Burns.
You can explore items from a variety of angles, listen to audio recordings and read articles from Burns experts – all illuminating different aspects of Burns’s life and legacy.
Explore the collection
Burns the man
A passion for books, music, nature and women shaped Robert Burns as a person and a poet.
Myths and folklore
Burns intertwined much of his work with Scotland’s traditions and folklore. His poems often reflect themes from events deeply rooted in Scottish cultural history.
Relationships
Poetry and love went together for Burns. He wrote poems, songs and letters to more than 200 people, from lovers and good friends to eminent professors and titled earls.
Memorialisation and legacy
Burns’s popularity, not only in Scotland but across the world, is extraordinary – his characteristic ability to express an idea in just a few lines or words has inspired many people.
Burns Relationship Explorer
Explore correspondence between senders and recipients of letters and documents in the Burns Collection.
Highlights from the collection
Acknowledgements
We were able to bring the Robert Burns Collection project to life thanks to the support of a member of our Patrons’ Club, whose generosity was matched by donations from the National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA.
We hope that this project might pave the way for us to develop further online collections as part of our strategy to make Scotland’s important history accessible to everyone – both now and in the future.
Some items in the collection were donated from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library by the Friends of the National Libraries in 2022.