Museums
in Ayrshire.

Burns's manuscripts and Irvine's shipyard.

Ayrshire's museums tell of its poet and its ships. In Alloway, the National Trust for Scotland's Birthplace Museum holds more than five thousand objects from the life of Robert Burns, his own manuscripts among them, and a path leads on to the cottage where he was born. In Mauchline, the house where Burns and Jean Armour lived covers his greatest years, with a room of Mauchline Ware in an old alehouse. On the harbour at Irvine, a Victorian shipyard engine shop moved from Govan holds boats, engines and a shipyard worker's flat, with an old puffer moored outside. Allow half a day for Alloway alone.