The history of Robert Burns and the Murray Arms
“Scotland’s greatest and best-loved poet.”
As history has it, Robert Burns and John Syme visited Gatehouse of Fleet during their first Galloway tour and stayed at the Murray Arms Hotel on 31 July 1793. The previous December the Convention of The Friends of the People had alarmed the government and Thomas Muir, one of its founders, was a fugitive from justice on his way to Portpatrick where he was arrested a few days later before being able to escape by boat to Ireland. Muir and his friends demanded universal suffrage and other parliamentary reforms, aspirations which were similar to those of Burns, and he was no doubt aware of Muir's flight.
While staying at the Murray Arms Hotel, Robert Burns remembered his visit to the fields of Bannockburn six years earlier, where Robert The Bruce’s troops marched to victory against Edward’s army in 1314 while singing an ancient ballad, ‘Hey Tutti Taitie’.
Pietro Urbani begged Burns to compose ‘soft’ verses for this tune. “I had no idea of giving myself any trouble on the subject, till the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for Freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some other struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhyming Mania”, wrote Burns a month later to George Thomson, when he enclosed the words to ‘Robert Bruce’s March To Bannockburn’.
This song is today more popularly known by its opening words - ‘ Scots Wha Hae’ and has become an unofficial National Anthem of Scotland. The song was composed in the Murray Arms, and was sent to Thomson while Thomas Muir was on trial in Edinburgh on charges of sedition.
The Gatehouse of Fleet Burns Club still meet on a regular basis in the hotel where they also have their annual Burns supper.
