This truth fand honest Tam o' Shanter, As he frae Ayr ae night did canter

"Tam o' Shanter" is Scots for "Tom of Shanter [Farm]. 

Every January, someone stands up at a Burns Supper and recites Tam o' Shanter. Every October, someone else reads it as a Halloween story. Both are right, and neither is in the poem.

Burns never gives the date. He gives a market day in Ayr, a storm, and a man who stayed too long at the inn. He had already written a poem called Halloween, five years earlier, and when he wanted that night he named it. Here the calendar appears only in Kate's complaint that Tam has been drunk every market day "frae November till October".

The poem belongs to October anyway. It has a ruined kirk, the dead holding lights, the Devil playing the pipes, and a dark road home. It was finished in late 1790. It is the best ghost story in Scots, and it is also very funny, which the school version tends to leave out.

This is a reading of it for adults, with one question in mind: what does this night smell like?

A poem written to get a drawing

In 1789 the antiquarian Francis Grose was touring Scotland, sketching ruins for a book. Burns asked him to include Alloway Kirk. It was a modest ruined kirk, hardly the grand antiquity Grose usually went looking for, but Burns was born half a mile from it, and his father was buried in the kirkyard.

Grose agreed on one condition: Burns must supply a witch story to go with the picture. Burns sent him three local tales in a letter, then turned the second into verse. The poem appeared in 1791 in the second volume of Grose's Antiquities of Scotland, printed as a long footnote to Grose's description of the kirk, alongside the engraving.

Burns wrote it at Ellisland, his farm on the Nith north of Dumfries. A later tradition, attributed to his wife Jean Armour, says he composed much of it in a single day, pacing the riverbank and laughing aloud. Burns himself called it his "standard performance in the Poetical line", and he was probably right.

The inn

The poem opens in the street, with the market winding down and Kate's opinion of her husband. About forty lines in, it settles indoors, where Tam likes best to be:

Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,
Wi' reaming swats, that drank divinely;

An ingle is a hearth fire. Reaming swats is new ale with the froth still on it. Beside him sits Souter Johnny, his "ancient, trusty, drouthy crony". A souter is a shoemaker, so the man at Tam's elbow has spent the day in leather and wax. Drouthy means thirsty.

Burns takes his time here. The landlady grows gracious, the landlord laughs at Johnny's stories, the ale keeps getting better. The storm is already roaring outside and Tam does not mind it "a whistle". Then come two lines that every Scot half-knows:

Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious!

It is worth noticing how much Burns likes this room. He is about to punish Tam for staying in it, but he writes it with more affection than anything else in the poem. Meanwhile, at home, miles to the south, Kate is "nursing her wrath to keep it warm".

The road

Then the door opens. Burns marks the turn with a change of voice: for eight lines he drops Scots for formal English, and tells us that pleasures are like poppies, or like snow falling on a river, "a moment white, then melts for ever". The warmth is over. Tam has to ride.

The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last;
The rattling showers rose on the blast;

He is on his grey mare Meg, holding his blue bonnet on with one hand, singing to keep his nerve. The road south from Ayr to the Doon is short, and Burns maps it by its dead. Here is the ford where a pedlar smothered in the snow. Here is the stone where drunken Charlie broke his neck. Here is the cairn where hunters found a murdered child, and the thorn tree where Mungo's mother hanged herself.

None of these deaths needs anything supernatural. Burns has mentioned ghosts by now, but this is simply what a country road remembers, and what a man alone on it at midnight cannot stop himself reciting. The horror in the poem starts well before the witches appear.

The kirk

Through the trees, Alloway Kirk appears to be on fire. Tam, full of ale and courage, rides straight up to look. Burns has a view on why:

Wi' tippenny, we fear nae evil;
Wi' usquabae, we'll face the devil!

Tippenny is twopenny ale. Usquabae is whisky, from the Gaelic uisge beatha, water of life.

Inside, witches and warlocks are dancing. They are not dancing anything foreign or fashionable. Burns is specific: hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys and reels. The Devil sits in a window seat in the shape of a big shaggy black dog, playing the pipes until the rafters shake. The light comes from open coffins standing round the walls, showing the dead in their burial clothes, each with a light in its cold hand. On the communion table lies a list of objects Burns sets out like an inventory: a murderer's bones in gibbet irons, a thief cut down from the rope, a knife, a garter.

Then the dancing speeds up, and Burns gives us the closest thing in the poem to an explicit smell:

Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark,

Every old witch sweated and reeked, and threw off her clothes to dance in her shift. Most of them are ancient and Tam is unmoved. One is not. Nannie is young, and wearing a cutty sark, a short shirt of coarse Paisley linen that her grandmother bought her as a child. She has long outgrown it. Tam watches, forgets where he is, and shouts:

"Weel done, Cutty-sark!"
And in an instant all was dark:

The brig

The witches pour out of the kirk like bees from a hive, and Meg runs for the river. The rule, which Burns explains in a footnote of his own, is that no witch can follow past the middle of a running stream. The Brig o' Doon is a single stone arch. Meg has to reach the keystone.

She almost does. Nannie catches her just short of it. Meg makes one last spring and carries Tam over, but her tail stays in Nannie's hand:

Ae spring brought off her master hale,
But left behind her ain gray tail:

Burns closes with a mock-serious moral. Whenever you are tempted by drink or by short shirts, remember Tam o' Shanter's mare. Tam did everything wrong and got home whole. The horse paid.

The bridge still stands at Alloway, and so does the kirk. Eighty years after the poem, a Dumbarton shipyard launched a tea clipper called Cutty Sark. Her figurehead is Nannie, arm outstretched, holding a horse's tail.

What the poem smells like

The honest answer is that Burns hardly says. He writes in sound and light: the wind, the pipes, the blaze in the trees, the instant dark. Smell is almost never named. It is in the nouns.

Read the poem for its materials and it sorts into two halves.

The inn is warm and dry. Burns supplies the fire and the ale with the froth on it. The rest is reconstruction: probably coal or peat on the hearth, oak in the casks and the settle, leather on the shoemaker and on the saddle outside, perhaps tobacco.

The road is cold and wet. Rain on a wool bonnet. A wet horse. Mud, which he calls dub and mire. Whin and birch. Then the kirk: old stone, perhaps tallow candles, and that crowd of dancers who "swat and reekit". Reek in Scots covers smoke, steam and stink, and here it means all three. Finally the river.

The poem is the journey from the first list to the second. A man leaves a room that smells of comfort and rides into one that smells of the grave. Drink is the thread between the two. Burns gives Tam foaming ale and names whisky; we chose the whisky.

The scent

Our Tam O'Shanter takes the first half and stops at the door.

It opens with smoked oak and black pepper, with rosemary for the sharpness of cold air when you come in from it. Then amber and whisky, and leather. Patchouli sits beneath: something dark and earthy that stays on a coat until morning.

There is no churchyard in it. We did not try to bottle Alloway Kirk, and nobody would thank us if we had(!) It is the inn, the part of the night Burns plainly loved, with the road outside implied by how warm it is in here.

The pub we had in mind is not actually in Ayr. It is on Rose Street in Edinburgh, on a wet night, with oak and a dram. We do not even know which Ayr inn Burns imagined. What was in it is easier to find: a fire, oak, leather, whisky, and bad weather outside.

Tam O'Shanter is 50 ml, and it is also in the Discovery Set if you would rather try it first.

How to read it

Aloud. It was written for the voice, and it takes ten or fifteen minutes. The Scots is lighter than it looks on the page, and most of the hard words explain themselves once you hear them in a line.

Read it this month, on a night with some wind. Then read it again on 25 January, at the table, with a dram, when it turns into the other poem everyone thinks it is.

See here for some fabulous depictions of the poem: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-38589577