Savills Portugal

Annually celebrated in Scotland and much further afield with evenings full of whisky, song, poetry and haggis, Burns Night is held around 25 January to commemorate the birthday of Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns.

Not only does Burns’s legacy live on his wonderful contribution to Scottish culture but it continues to add to the charm of his birthplace, the conservation village of Alloway in Ayrshire. Once a rural hamlet on the banks of the River Doon, it is now a pretty and affluent suburb of Ayr and a jewel in the crown of the local residential property market.

Burns’s original Alloway home was built by his father William in 1757, two years before the poet’s birth on 25 January 1759. A tenant farmer himself, William ensured his son received a good education and Robert read avidly. As a young man he increasingly turned his attentions away from farming and towards his true passions of poetry, nature, drink and women.

The family’s whitewashed single-storey thatched cottage still stands strong, after spending most of the 19th century as a private residence for rent and then, rather fittingly, as an alehouse. It was restored to its former glory by the Alloway Burns Monument Trust in 1881 before being acquired by the National Trust for Scotland.

Today, visitors can see where the Burns family lived, side by side with their farm animals; where they ate meals cooked in the little kitchen area; where young Robert read by the fireside and slept in the tiny box-bed he shared with his three siblings. The walls of the cottage have been artfully daubed with fragments of his verse and outside is the small farm where Robert tended the crops alongside his father and brother Gilbert.

Burns's poetry complemented the growing literary taste for romanticism in the 18th century, and he was already hailed the Ploughman Poet by his late twenties. As such, the heritage value of the cottage was evident very early on: William sold the cottage for £160 in 1781 and it was bought for the princely sum of £4,000 exactly 100 years later*.

According to Savills latest research, South Ayrshire, also home to other coastal hotspots of Troon, Prestwick and Turnberry, continues to outperform values for Scotland as a whole. It saw average price growth of 6 per cent to £164,185 during the 12 months ending September 2018. This is 30 per cent higher than neighbouring East Ayrshire and 23 per cent higher than North Ayrshire.

Savills is currently selling a wonderful range of houses in this lovely region. Here are some of the best.

* Figures provided by ScARF (Scottish Archaeological Research Framework)