We’d stopped by a Morrison’s on the way home last night so in the morning we made ourselves some egg and bacon sandwiches/bagels for breakfast and set up some ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch. Then we rushed out the door to make our way to Enterprise and pick up our hire car. Once we’d sorted out all the paperwork we drove out of the city and headed south down towards Ayrshire. I was surprised by how quickly the city turned into countryside and although we were mostly on highways, there were lovely views of rolling hills and farms that reminded me quite a bit of the countryside around Neerim South. 

We drove through Kilmarnock and headed down to Cumnock, where a lot of the Baird family are from according to my family research so far. At various points throughout the day I was a bit annoyed with myself at not having done more specific research into this particular part of the family, as we began the search for ‘the’ cemetery and realised that there were several! We parked the car in Cumnock and found the Old Cumnock church, where several baptisms /marriages had occurred, but it wasn’t open to the public. Just around the corner from it though, we found the Baird Institute, a local museum founded in 1891 by an unrelated (or possibly very distantly related) John Baird. It was closed for lunch when we got there, so we went for a wander around town, got a coffee and sat in the shade for a while before heading back.

The Baird Institute was interesting, but not as informative about the local area as I’d hoped. There were a lot of more recent artefacts – war medals, information about the local stately home, and some exhibits on mining in the region. The largest room was filled with a photograph exhibition of images of Ayrshire and Galloway though, which was gorgeous. Once we’d finished having a look around, we headed back to the car and drove down towards New Cumnock, where a lot of other family members were from. This was a pretty tiny town, but my main goal was the cemetery. Unfortunately when we arrived, it became quickly obvious that this was a new cemetery, with all of the stones listing dates in the 20^th century. After a bit of quick Googling in the car, I realised that the old cemetery was in Cumnock, so we headed back there.

We spent a hot hour or so in the sun exploring the old cemetery (which wasn’t even marked on google maps!) and were quickly rewarded by the find of the grave of my 3^rd great grandparents (McKerrows).  This gave us hope at least! I was searching for particular great(etc)-grandparents who were on both sides of the family due to a marriage between cousins, and didn’t manage to find theirs, but after looking through about half of the graves, Peter spotted another Baird gravestone and it turned out to be the parents of the John Baird I was looking for, my 5^th-great-grandparents. That was very cool! There was a fallen-over gravestone on one side of theirs, and a completely overgrown one on the other so when we failed to find the other Bairds after looking through all of the gravestones, we suspected that perhaps it was one of those – or they were buried elsewhere. 

After all of that excitement, it was time to head to the beach! There were a few other tiny villages that had family history connected but I had to acknowledge that I didn’t have enough information to follow them up. Instead, we drove down to Ayr, where we pulled in to a spot near the beach and wandered down to the waterfront. Being a beautiful sunny day, it was pretty busy, and we were people-dodging quite a bit walking along the promenade, so we ended up going and buying an iced coffee each and sitting with a view of the beach. I was surprised that it was a proper sandy beach, but I can’t imagine there’d be that many days a year that it would be hot enough to swim! 

Once we felt satisfied that we’d had enough sun, we hopped back in the car and headed back to Glasgow. We parked the car and then headed off on foot to find some dinner ingredients. We made delicious steaks and veg for dinner and had a quiet evening of watching Fringe. We’d woken up with lots of bites this morning that definitely look like bedbugs, and weren’t sure if it was from last night or the night before, so just to be careful we slept on the fold-out couch.