King of Kyle

by Geoff Crolley

Dr. Fiona Watson in "A Report into Sir William Wallace's connections with Ayrshire" (1999) for East Ayrshire Council, reassessed the early life of William Wallace. Her findings seem to show that he was a Kyle Regis boy, his father being Alan Wallace, crown tenant.  If this means what I think it does, then Big Wull came from the parish of Cumnock.  So why aren't we making a song and dance about the fact?

We're told that the one chance of bringing money into the area is tourism, so why don't we use the facts laid out before us:

The greatest hero of Scotland came from here!!!!

A wee monument, a statue, a road sign pointing to Castle William, anything.


Geoff Crolley says

THE BURNS COUNTRY BY CHARLES S. DOUGALL, M.A., SECOND EDITION

[Quote]CHAPTER II WALLACE IN AYRSHIRE

" At Wallace' name, what Scottish blood
But boils up in a spring-tide flood ?
Oft have our fearless fathers strode
By Wallace' side,
Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod,
Or glorious died."

FROM Loudoun Hill to Turnberry, Ayrshire abounds in memories of the struggle for Scottish independence. Though Wallace was not born in Ayrshire, Kyle was the country of his ancestors, Wallaces and Crawfords ; to Kyle he turned when danger threatened him ; there he did the deeds which proved his power to lead ;
and " King of Kyle " was the mock title bestowed on him by knights and nobles jealous of his governorship. Wallace is Scotland's popular hero. Human sympathies ever go out to the brave unfortunate, and Wallace's countrymen regard him as a martyr to their cause. There was a time when the story of his life and death, as it is told in Hamilton of Gilbertfield's setting of Blind Harry's Acts and Deeds of the Illustrious and Valiant Champion, or in some prose version
thereof, was the possession of every Scottish schoolboy. It was one of Robert Burns's first books. "The story of Wallace," he said "poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest." Nowadays Harry the Minstrel is discredited. We have learned to doubt those traditions, which had lived and not unnaturally grown during the two hundred years between their origin and his singing them. With his perfervid patriotism, his manifest exaggerations, and his indifference to chronology, Blind Harry was no historian. He was, however, a capital story-teller, and he has given to Ayrshire woods and streams an interest which was real enough to Robert Burns. [/Quote]Copied from:
http://www.archive.org/stream/burnscountry00douguoft/burnscountry00douguoft_djvu.txt on 02/09/09

1st Edition published in 1904
2nd Edition published in 1911
DOUGALL still says that Wallace didn't come from Ayrshire even though the Lubeck Letter had been discovered.

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