page_title: Trysting tree
section_title: Robert Burns
hierarchical_section_title: Trysting tree / Surviving and previously recorded examples / Scotland / Robert Burns
caption_attribution_description: English: The Trysting Tree, Millmannoch, East Ayrshire, Scotland.
context_page_description: Trysting trees are trees of any species which have, through their individual prominence, appearance, or position, been chosen as traditional or popular meeting places for meetings for specific purposes. Names, dates, and symbols are sometimes found carved on the bark, favouring trees with smoother bark, such as beech, hornbeam and sycamore.
  Many other forms of landscape features have served as trysting places, such as the Lochmaben Stone on the border of Scotland and England. It was a well known, well recognised and easily located 'marker' on the Scottish Marches and where a number of functions were performed prior to the Union of the Crowns, such arranging truces, exchanging prisoners, etc.
context_section_description: Robert Burns writes of a trysting thorn tree (see below) at the Mill of Mannoch at Coylton in South Ayrshire. A new hawthorn tree was planted on the site and iron railings placed around it. This tree still survives (2012).
  The National Burns Collection holds a cross section of thorn wood from a tree which grew at the Mill of Mannoch, Coylton, Ayrshire which was said to be Robert Burns' "trysting thorn", a romantic meeting place. One polished surface of the thorn wood reads:
  From Burns' poem "The Soldier's Return".
caption: Trysting Tree at Millmannoch Mill.
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