Alloway Auld Kirk
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), brought poets back to the original sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear."--The Tale of Terror (1921) by Edith Birkhead |
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The Alloway Auld Kirk, which dates back to the 16th Century, is a ruin in Alloway, South Ayrshire, Scotland (Template:Gbmapping), celebrated as the scene of the witches' dance in the poem "Tam o' Shanter" by Robert Burns.
William Burnes, father of the poet, is buried in the graveyard together with his wife Agnes and daughter Isabella as well as two of his nieces. Alloway was where he and his wife had first raised their family before moving to Mount Oliphant and Lochlea, and William had attempted to maintain the grounds of the Kirk, which was already a ruin at the time.
