The Adjacent Islands: Literary Associations of the County of Bute

Though the county of Bute has a long and honourable literary history, its associations with song and story are not all likely to be familiar to the man in the street. If his street is located in a town in the industrial West of Scotland, this mythical arbiter may indeed be able to produce from a kind of race memory the rollicking strains of “The Day we went to Rothesay—O”, or, if he inclines to the sentimental, the plaintiff Victorian ballad “Sweet Rothesay Bay”. He may also know about the minister in Millport who prayed for “the Great and Little Cumbraes and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland.”