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Poe's Scottish Connections
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Searching For Poe In Scotland
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Seen in the photo with the author are Dundonald Parish Kirk Archivist Gordon McDonald, and his wife, Jeanette. Following on with former archivist Bobby Kirk's information of the Holy Communion Service set gifted by Edgar Allan Poe's great--grand uncle, John Galt, of Craigsland Farm, Mister McDonald researched the Kirk's Session Records to find the documentation of the gift. All of these details are provided in our biography, "Mar'sa Eddie" in the Shire, Edgar Allan Poe's Scottish Connections, in progress.
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The newly installed plaque about Edgar Allan Poe's connection with Kilmarnock is listed in the companion guide to a walking tour, in the above photo, of that city. Our friend, Frank Beattie, Staff Reporter for the Kilmarnock Standard, and well known local historian, is largely responsible for our efforts of having the plaque included in the Kilmarnock Historical Society's request for funds from the National Government that paid for it.
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CERTAIN AS THERE IS AN ENDING to everything, including the universe, as Edgar Allan Poe tells us in his 1847 work, Eureka, there is a beginning. Ours began when Ms. Kenmotsu bought Brill a copy of Raymond Foye’s work, The Unknown Poe. We had stopped by the San Francisco bookstore on Broadway, City Lights Books, made famous by the Beat Poets of the Sixties. City Lights published The Unknown Poe. The owners would never know what an extraordinary effect the book would have on the present Poe in Scotland project.
That purchase was for my birthday, April 1996. A few months later Ms. Kenmotsu purchased still another book about Poe: Israfel. This was a used edition of Hervey Allen’s 1934, one volume biography of the poet. From a reintroduction to my favorite author and thinker during the English Major at the University of California-Davis in 1972, our project evolved.
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As we had made our first trip to Scotland during the fall of 1996, in search of our own family connection in Perthshire, Hervey Allen’s Chapter Five, "Israfel in Albion," became an idea for traveling to another part of Scotland, Ayrshire, in search of Poe's family. The author wanted to see where Poe had been in Scotland, almost two hundred years earlier. An itinerary to unknown towns and cities in western Scotland became a compulsion. At our first opportunity we made our visit.
It may be important here to tell our readers that we had visited most of the Poe venues in the United States before deciding to visit those in Scotland shown on these pages. For example, we visited the Richmond Poe Museum, The University of Virginia’s Charlottesville campus, and its Room 13, on the West Range, as well as the Poe family burial sites at the church in Baltimore, Maryland. We experienced nothing of a feel of Poe’s poetry and fiction there, but they were a beginning. We did feel, "Eureka-I found it," from our very first visit to Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland.
This site remains, "Under construction...." Thank you for your interest, and visiting! Direct any inquiries or comments to Bob Brill at E-mail address: poeinscotland@aol.com. As of 2007, I live in Thailand.
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