Dowan's Hill is a fort with double ramparts. It gets a mention in Robert Burns' poem "Halloween":Upon that night when fairies light
On Cassillis Downans dance
Or owre the lays in splendid blaze
On sprightly coursers prance;
Or for Colean the rout is ta'en
Beneath the moon's pale beams;
There up the cove, to stray and rove
Amang the rocks and streams. Burns wrote in a 1787 letter: "In my infant and boyish days too, I owed much to an old maid of my Mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity and superstition. --She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, Kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery.
--This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-our in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of Philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."
found in Robert Burns' Satires and the Folk Tradition: "Halloween"
Butler Waugh
South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 32, No. 4. (Nov., 1967), pp. 10-13.
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Posted by Rhiannon
16th August 2007ce
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