In midsummer 1775, William Burnes, the poet Robert Burns’ father, sent his 17-year-old son some 10 miles down the road to Kirkoswald. He was to study trigonometry, geometry and mensuration under the aegis of one Hugh Rodger, a local schoolmaster. The young poet seems to have made good progress with his studies. He also looks to have made good progress in the local social scene, as he later wrote: ’I made greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at that time very successful: scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were as yet new to me, and I was no enemy to social life.’
This ‘social life’ led to a local young lady catching the fledgling poet’s roving eye, again, in his own words: ’a charming fillette who lived next door to the school, overset my trigonometry and set me off in a tangent.’
This ‘charming fillette’ was one Margaret ‘Peggy’ Thomson. The daughter of a local joiner. She becomes immortalised in verse as the Peggy who accompanies the young Burns on his rural meanderings in his early masterpiece, Now Westlin Winds.