If you want to see the well where allegedly ‘Mungo’s mither hang’d hersel’ you must cross the road into Murdoch’s Lone and go carefully down to the bank to the railway. Proceed left along the line of the railroad through the tunnel.
The tunnel runs under the B7024 and the gardens of Doonbrae House. To the east of the tunnel lay Alloway’s Railway Station’s island platform and a coal ‘lie’. The line was that of the Maidens and Dunure Light railway, part of the Glasgow and South Western Railway, opened in May 1906, chiefly to serve the luxurious hotel and golf course they were then building at Turnberry, (in the vicinity of Robert the Bruce’s birthplace). The line did not pay and closed in December 1930. When Butlins opened as a holiday camp the line was re-opened between Alloway and the Heads of Ayr but was finally closed in 1968.
The tunnel was originally a cutting beyond the B7024 with vertical walls but was covered over, it is reputed, because James Baird of Cambusdoon did not like to see the smoke from the trains disfiguring his view. Another, less personalised possibility, put forward is that the line was built in this costly manner to avoid disfiguring the area around the Burns Monument and Kirk Alloway.