Poet's Path - The Fox
"Liberty Regain'd". Artist - Kenny Hunter. Installed 2012
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Going down the pathway, we soon come to the statue of a fox with a broken chain dangling behind it. This commemorates the fox in Burns' poem 'On Glenriddell's Fox Breaking His Chain'. Captain Robert Riddell of Glenriddle kept a pet fox in a dog kennel - something that Burns, with his libertarian principles, abhorred. When the fox escaped Burns seized the opportunity to compose these lines on his favourite theme of Liberty.
...These things premis'd, I sing a Fox -
Was caught among his native rocks,
And to a dirty kennel chained -
How he his liberty regained....
Walking on, you come to a long line of weathervanes, each depicting a scene from Robert Burns' famous poem 'Tam o'Shanter' interspersed with a few other sculpted reminders of a few of Burns' notable poems.