On May 30, 1787, on only his second visit to England, Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) rode from Newcastle through Hexham to Wardrew Spa (Gilsland), accompanied by two friends.

They following day they rode to the hiring fair at Longtown. Burns seems to have relished the convivial atmosphere, where the masters and the farm servants were making the most of their day away from the farm. His two farming friends transacted their business, the trio had dinner and Burns went on to Carlisle by himself.

He stayed at The Malt Shovel, one of the first inns within the city walls in Rickergate. He went out to meet his friend Mitchell, a printer. They intended to walk the city streets, but they were separated. Burns went on alone to the inn where they had arranged to dine.

He was peeping round the bar looking for Mitchell, when a voice called, “Come in, Johnny Peep!” Burns was happy to join the three drinkers and take part, anonymously, in a rhyming game with half-crown stakes. Robbie Burns, of course, won. His winning entry was:

“Here am I, Johnny Peep,

I saw three sheep,

And these three sheep saw me;

Half-a-crown a-piece.

Will pay for their fleece,

And so, Johnny Peep gets free.”

In the meantime, his horse, Jenny Geddes, named after a woman who had thrown a stool at the Bishop of Edinburgh, had been impounded. He’d allowed her to graze unlawfully on the Corporation land at Bitts. The landlord at the Malt Shovel, Peter Reid, told him that he would have to pay a fine to the Mayor at the Town Hall the following morning. The payment was proffered with another extempore verse attached:

“Was e’er poet sae befitted,

The maister drunk, the horse committed.

Puir harmless beast! tak’ thee nae care,

Thou’lt be a horse when he’s nae mair.”

The Mayor, so the story goes, was happy to waive the fine.

While he was in Carlisle Robert Burns found time to write a letter to a teacher friend of his, William Nicol. Nicol was an undermaster teaching the classics with a bad-temper and a heavy rod at the High School in Edinburgh.

One tale tells of Burns and Nicol coming in to class one morning so hungover that they both fell asleep in front of the assembled boys, who were too afraid to wake them. Nicol was from Annan, ten years older than Burns, but the two were great companions and later in the year they departed on an argumentative tour of the Highlands together.

There was certainly a high level of camaraderie between the two. This joking letter is the only letter he wrote in Scots dialect and significantly, Burns, who barely travelled outside Scotland in his life, chose to write it when he was in England. In the letter he make much of two lassies he encountered in Longtown: “I met wi’ twa dink queynes in particular, ane o’ them a sonsie, fine, fodgel lass, baith braw and bonnie; the tither was a clean-shankit, stra light, tight, weel-far’d wench, as blythe’s a lintwhite on a flowerie thorn, and as sweet and modest’s a new-blawn plum-rose in a hazle shaw.” He met up with one of them in Carlisle. He gave “her a brush of caressing and a bottle of cider” but she “sheered off” and left him, and he got so drunk after dinner that he could barely crawl from one room to the other. He told Nicol: “but, guid forgie me, I gat mysel’ sae notouriously bitchify’d the day, after kail-time, that I can hardly stoiter but an’ ben.”

Robbie Burns only made the one visit to Carlisle, but it was a fairly eventful visit.

n Steve Matthews owns Bookends, 19 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and www.books cumbria.com is open for phone orders (01228 529067) and email orders.