Ayrshire > Volume 1

3*6 HISTORY OF AYRSHIRE
compelled to meet the advances that had been made to
them, they had no alternative to selling their estates.
It is surely an ill wind that blows good to nobody. The
failure of Douglas, Heron, and Co. was ill, almost beyond
conception, and yet it was not without its attendant
compensations. It had enabled the impoverished
landlords to improve their estates, and the improvements
remained ; and in compelling them to sell out, it brought
into Ayrshire a new class of landowners, some of whom
had amassed money abroad, some of whom had made
it in commerce at home, wno were able to live up to the
responsibilities upon which they had entered. Under
the disaster itself Ayrshire had staggered, but it was not
long in recovering, and in resuming the march of
improvement from which straight course it has never
again deviated.
As we have seen, the Ayrshire of the middle of the
eighteenth century was in many ways a wretched and a
backward place. By the end of the centurj/ an enormous
change had come over its general appearance. In 1793
there was issued a work entitled " Observations made
in a Journey through the Western Counties of Scotland
in the Autumn of 1792," by Robert Heron. Heron had
come up from the south through Carrick, and had
reached Ayr ; and, after he had recalled the rise and
fall of the Ayrshire Bank, he proceeded to summarise
what had been accomplished for the county mainly
through its instrumentality. " Clumps of wood were
scattered over the knolls, belts were stretched along the
edges of the lawns, the water was taught here to stagnate
into pools, and there to wind with an artificially
meandering course. The strata of limestone were
quarried and burnt ; the beds of coals were opened up ;
skilful farmers were invited hither from Berwickshire
and from England. Kyle and Cunningham were opened
up by roads in every direction, and the middle and the
northern districts of Ayrshire soon came to exhibit
nothing but one continued series of towns, villages,
ornamented farmhouses, villas, and palaces, divided by