Robert Burns may never have visited Ireland, but Ulsterman of all hues beat a path to his door

(Admittedly some of Burns’ friends and family did visit and even settle here. His friend the Rev James Gray became the principal of Belfast Academy in 1822 and Burns’ sister Agnes moved to Dundalk with her husband William Galt in 1817. Robert Burns Jnr was a frequent visitor to Belfast. Martha Burns Everitt, Burns’ granddaughter, grew up in Belfast.)

On the basis that ‘if the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain’, Ulster admirers of the Bard visited their literary hero in Scotland.

Dr Linde Lunney has observed that ‘contemporary sources are full of enthusiastic references to his poems and there are so many ascriptions of visits to Burns by Ulstermen that it seems he must have done little after 1787 but drink the health of his visiting Ulster fans’.

In February/March 1794 Samuel Thomson, a schoolmaster poet often referred to both as ‘the Father of the Rhyming Weavers’ (although he was not himself a weaver) and ‘the Bard of Carngranny’ (between Mullusk and Templepatrick), and his friend John Williamson travelled to Dumfries to meet Burns.

The journey on foot took three days in each direction.

For Thomson the visit was one of the most significant events of his life. Burns gave him a copy of two poems, one of which is not otherwise known.

The previous year Thomson published his own collection of poems – ‘Poems on Different Subjects, Partly in the Scottish Dialect’ – making Thomson the first Ulster vernacular poet to publish a book of poetry.

The collection was dedicated it to ‘Mr Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Poet’ and even included a poem entitled ‘Epistle to Mr Robert Burns’:

I’ve aften read their pages a’An’ monie mair o’ deep ingineBut frae a’ the verses e’er I sawYour Cotter fairly taks the shine.

Thomson and Burns exchanged letters, books and snuff.

In 1786 the Belfast News Letter became the first newspaper outside Scotland to publish extracts of Burns’ poetry.

In July 1794 Henry Joy, the joint-proprietor of the News Letter, a barrister and a future judge, and his friend William Bruce, minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street and principal of the Belfast Academy, visited Burns in Dumfries.

Joy and Bruce, Burns’ most eminent visitors from Ulster, were returning from a visit to the Lake District and had reached Cumbria on their journey home.

On July 6 1794, according to Joy’s account: ‘Left Wigtown [ie Wigton] so as to reach Bowness and cross the strands at low water for Annan in Scotland. We reached Dumfries in time for dinner, desirous to devote the rest of the day to Robert Burns, the Ayrshire ploughman & poet.’

Burns was late for the meeting. Burns and Joy discussed a wide range of topics, from politics to poetry. Burns, Joy records, said that he ‘preferred a republic for a new country’ since a republican system gave ‘dignity and importance to every individual in society and tends to the cultivation of talents often lost in an inequality of ranks’.

However, he appears to have agreed with Joy’s view that ‘our own constitution, improved, is preferable for us’.

Among Scottish poets he admired [Allan] Ramsay and [James] Thomson (Joy disagreed about Thomson) and he also admired Cowper.

Of his own works, he told Joy, he preferred ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. Joy expressed his own admiration for ‘To a Mountain Daisy’. Burns also remarked to Joy that he had never had a classical education but that all he knew had been taught to him by his father. Joy went on to inquire about Burns’ method of composition:

‘His muse was most propitious, he said, at night when his family were at rest. At that time, he usually sat down with his box of Lundy Foot’s “Irish Blackguard” and a tumbler of spirits and water; and as often as he found himself “gumm’d” in a passage, he started to his feet, and was sure to find relief in a hearty pinch of “Lundy”.’

(By way of clarification, Lundy Foot was a Dublin tobacconist and the manufacturer of a snuff called ‘Irish Blackguard’.)

In 1796 Luke Mullan, a neighbour and friend of Samuel Thomson and the brother-in-law of James Hope, the working-class United Irishman from Mullusk, visited Burns.

However, they did not speak much. Mullan realised all was not well with the Bard and reported back to Thomson:

‘He [Burns] is not much respected in Dumfries on account of his infidelity to his wife – but as an officer of the excise [Burns secured a position as an excise man in 1789 which afforded him a hitherto unknown level of financial security] he is said to be very humane to poor people. In short, he is allowed to be a fine social companion and an honest man. But too much enamour’d of the joys of Venus … I believe he writes little now – he offers some to the Dumfries papers and is not accepted – so little are great men thought in their own country and in their lifetime ...’

Although Burns' worldly prospects had never been better, he had managed to antagonise influential people with his espousal of views sympathetic to the French Revolution.

While it was acceptable for Wordsworth to write ‘Bliss was it in dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven’ before the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France and ‘The Terror’, such views were regarded as beyond the pale by the Establishment in mid-1790s.

With his employment at serious risk, Burns found it politic to join the Royal Dumfries Volunteers in March 1795.

His employment as an excise officer entailed long journeys on horseback, often in harsh weather which undermined his health – perhaps combined with excessive enjoyment of alcohol.

Others, however, would insist Burns’ early death on July 21 1796 was attributable to a long-standing rheumatic heart condition.