[A composite volume : containing The ballads and songs of Ayrshire ...

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MAT coLvnsr.
This version of " May Colvin " is copied from Motherwell's Collection.
Motherwell states that he had seen a " printed stall copy as early as 1749,
entitled, ' The Western Tragedy,' " which perfectly agreed with the enlarged
version given from recitation in Sharpe's Ballad Book.
He had
also " seen a later stall print, called the ' Historical Ballad of May Culezean,'
to which is prefixed some local tradition, that the lady there celebrated
was of the family of Kennedy, and that her treacherous and murder-hunting
lover was an Ecclesiastick of the Monastery of Maybole."
In Carrick, where the ballad is popular, the general tradition is that the
" Fause Sir John" was the laird of Carleton, and " May Colzean" a
daughter of Kennedy of Culzean.
Chambers has thus embodied the tradition
:— " The ballad finds locality in that wild portion of the coas t of 5
Carrick which intervenes betwixt Girvan and Ballantrae. Carleton i
Castle, about two miles to the south of Girvan, (a tall old ruin, situated i
on the brink of a bank which overhangs the sea, and which gives title to
Sir John Cathcart,
Bart, of Carleton) is affirmed by the country people,
who still remember the story [tradition rather] with great freshness, to
have been the residence of ' the Fause Sir John ;' while a little rocky eminence,
called Gamsloup, overhanging the sea about two miles farther
south, and over which the road passes in a style terrible to all travellers,
is pointed out as the place where he was in the habit of drowning his
wives, and where he was finally drowned himself. The people, who look \
upon the ballad as a regular and proper record of an unquestionable fact,
farther affirm that May Collean was a daughter of the family of Kennedy
! of Culzean, now represented by the Earl of Cassillis, and that she became
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heir to all the immense wealth which her husband had acquired by his for-
mal-practices, and accordingly lived happily all the rest of her days."
The version we have given is the one common in Carrick.
The air is par.
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ticularly plaintive, and when sung in the simple style of the peasantry, is
very interesting. A ballad, under the same title, and precisely similar in
incident, is printed by Buchan in his Collection, who points out Binyan's
Bay, at the mouth of the Ugie, where Peterhead now stands, as the scene
of" the Fause Sir John's" fate. The old minstrels were so much in the
habit of altering the names of persons and places, to suit the districts in
which they sojourned for the time, that it is, in many instances, difficult
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