Old travel Blog photograph of Robert Tannahill's thatched cottage in Paisley by Glasgow, Scotland. Robert Tannahill was born at Castle Street in Paisley on 3 June 1774, the fourth son in a family of seven. His mother was Janet Pollock from Boghall Farm near Beith and his father was James Tannahill from Kilmarnock. Soon after his birth the family moved to a newly built cottage in nearby Queen Street, which became both family home and weaving shop. Robert had a delicate constitution and a limp, due to a slight deformity in his right leg. On leaving school at age twelve, he was apprenticed to his father as a handloom weaver. It was during this time that Tannahill began to show an interest in poetry. With his apprenticeship completed, Tannahill left the town but, after two years working in Bolton, Lancashire, England from late 1799 to late 1801, he returned home to support the family. His father died soon after and his mother was infirm. As he reported in a letter to a friend, " My brother Hugh and I are all that remain at home, with our old mother, bending under age and frailty; and but seven years back, nine of us used to sit down at dinner together. " Then Hugh married and Robert was left the sole support, making a resolution which he records in a touching but substandard poem in English, "The Filial Vow". As things fell out, however, his mother was to outlive him by thirteen years. In the years which followed, his interest in poetry and music blossomed after becoming acquainted with the composer Robert Archibald Smith, who set some of his songs in the Scots language to music. While taking part in the literary life of the town, he helped found the Paisley Burns Club and became its secretary. His work now began to appear in periodicals such as The Scots Magazine and in 1807 he published a small collection of poems and songs in an edition of 900 copies which sold out in a few weeks. Out on a walk some time later, he heard a girl in a field singing his "We'll meet beside the dusky glen on yon burnside" and was greatly encouraged. But in 1810, following the rejection of an augmented collection of his work by publishers in Greenock and Edinburgh, he fell into a despondency aggravated by fears for his own health. Eventually he burned all his manuscripts and drowned himself on May 17, 1810, in a culverted stream under the Paisley Canal, where he was found because he had left his jacket at the mouth of the tunnel.
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