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Leighton Library, Dunblane

Scotland's oldest purpose-built independent library founded in 1687

Robert Burns and the Leighton Library's 1787 Edinburgh First Edition

The Leighton Library has a 1787 Edinburgh First Edition of "Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect" by Robert Burns, who visited Dunblane that same year. This edition contained an additional 17 poems and 5 new songs, in addition to most of the poems present in the 1786 Kilmarnock Edition. Dunblane Burns Club funded conservation work on this volume, which is known colloquially as the “Creech edition” from its publisher, William Creech. This edition saw the first publication of a number of poems and songs. The famous address "To a Haggis" and "Green grow the Rashes" appear in the Edinburgh First Edition of 1787 but  didn't appear in the Kilmarnock edition of the previous year. 

Click here to download the learning resource about the address "To a Haggis" from the 1787 Edinburgh First Edition of "Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect" by Robert Burns. This resource was created by Leighton Library Volunteer Guide Malcolm Wilson.

This learning resource contains images of each of the three pages containing the address "To a Haggis" by Robert Burns from the Leighton Library's 1787 Edinburgh First Edition. These are presented side-by-side with text in a more easily read format.

There is an activity about the common practice of using a "long s" in place of the letter s we would recognise today (and helps the learner understand why texts printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century are harder to read for us today).

There is a wordsearch, a jumbled words activity, a crossword puzzle, and a fill-in-the-blanks activity, all using words from the address "To a Haggis", and each with with an associated colouring activity.

There is an English translation of the poem to aid learners who may be unfamiliar with the Scots words and phrases used by Robert Burns.

There is a guide to creating a poem of your own, in the style of "To a Haggis", about a food you like to eat, with suggestions for what to include and how to build it with the same rhythm of syllables and rhyming pattern.

 

 

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