What happened
In 1785 Robert Burns, then a farmer in his mid-twenties in Ayrshire, wrote his long poem “Halloween,” published a year later in the celebrated Kilmarnock volume. It opens with the night “when fairies light on Cassilis Downans dance” – the Downans being a few small, rocky green hills near Cassillis House, the old seat of the Earls of Cassilis on the River Doon – while others ride their steeds to the caves below Culzean Castle. Then the poet moves into a farmhouse, where “some merry, friendly, countra-folks” gather “to burn their nits, an’ pou their stocks.” Every game was a charm to divine a future spouse: kail stalks pulled up blindfold revealed what a husband or wife would be like, a pair of nuts in the fire showed whether lovers would stay together, and whoever ate an apple before a mirror would see the face of their future partner in it. The bolder sowed hemp seed at night, dipped a sleeve in a burn where three lairds’ lands met, or went alone to the barn – risking a meeting with something they would rather not see. Burns added footnotes to the poem explaining these customs to town readers.
Witnesses
Robert Burns, “Halloween” (written in 1785, published in 1786 in “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect”), with the author’s notes explaining the rural customs of Ayrshire.
Explanations and hypotheses
Burns’s poem is a valuable contemporary record of eighteenth-century Scottish Halloween customs – charms, games and the belief that fairies came out of the hills that night. The poet himself treated them with humour and affection, not as proof of supernatural beings. Scottish and Irish emigrants took these customs – nut and apple charms, guising and turnip lanterns – to North America, where in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they grew into the modern Halloween. The Cassillis Downans today are ordinary grazing land on private ground.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
More: Wikipedia (en)