Suffering shortbread! It's Burns Night again

To many Scots he's a hero, but a tour of his haunts tells a different tale. No wonder women aren't crazy about him, says Juliet Clough

Asked to write about Burns country, to mark the worldwide haggisfest held every 25 January in honour of Scotland's national bard, I cajoled my husband John into lending a hand with the research. "Burns's work has not traditionally been a female taste," says Donald McFarlan in the very first line of his introduction to the Wordsworth Poetry Library's collected works. Now, whatever can have given him that idea? The email John sent our son was similarly circumspect: "Next stop Poosie Nansie's tavern," it read, "the haunt of 'a merry core O' randie gangrel bodies', to quote The Jolly Beggars; and o' much quaffing and laughing, jumping and thumping besides. Mum thinks it might not be her thing."

Yes, this is literary territory into which the unprotected female should venture warily. There is much about Burns to cause the heart of 21st-century woman to beat faster. Though, for all his undoubted way wi' the lassies, it is more likely to beat with indignation and incredulity, if not terminal boredom, than with romantic speculation.

Our trail led into deepest Ayrshire and Dumfries, on the sort of day which The Jolly Beggars hit off to a T: "When lyart leaves bestrow the yird ... When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte, And infant frosts begin to bite". Something told me that hunting for Rabbie's convivial spirit through glum, former mining villages, where the chip shop or games arcade was often the only sign of community life, was an uphill task.

First stop, the thatched cottage in Alloway where, on 25 January 1759, Burns was born to extreme poverty. Here, too, stands the Burns Monument, a colossal Grecian-style temple, deeply incongruous in design, a tribute to the "heaven-taught ploughman's" meteoric rise in popular esteem after his death in 1796, aged only 37.

Burns's father William, evidently more of a Grundy than an Archer when it came to farming, had a deep respect for education and made sure that his sons were well-tutored. The museum at the birthplace holds a fascinating collection of manuscripts and documents including many of Robert's own books: Swift, Cicero, Sterne, Homer, Virgil. One of the peculiarly irritating things about the "heaven-taught ploughman" line is that Burns could write perfectly good classical English.

OK, he wrote some wonderful, lyrical stuff in the vernacular. His poems set to old Scots airs, such as "Auld Lang Syne" and "O my Luve's like a red, red rose", have passed into the universal canon of friendship and love. "For a' that and a' that" has given voice the world over to the "common man's" longing for equality. It's just that most of the tartan-clad idolatory does scant justice to the complex, human, warts-and-all persona of the lad.

In Mauchline I went right off him again. Burns and his new but already long-suffering wife Jean Armour lived in a chilly rented room here in 1788 to 1789. The poet wrote that he had found Jean "banished and friendless. All for the good old cause. I have taken her a room. I have taken her to my arms. I have given her a mahogany bed. I have given her a guinea". Big deal. Jean's portrait looks decidedly thin-lipped and no wonder. She bore two sets of twins to Burns before their marriage in 1788 and was to have five more children by him. With true heroism she also gave a home to at least two of the offspring resulting from his many affairs.

And Robert was "constantly the victim of some fair enslaver". Threatened in 1786 by a writ from Jean's father, he decided "to wipe away the decent tear" and decamp for Jamaica with his new squeeze, Highland Mary. But lacking the crucial nine guineas and with stardom beckoning, thanks to the overnight success of his published poems, the lover headed instead for the fashionable salons of Enlightenment Edinburgh.

Within five months Mary had expired, in true Romantic fashion, and Burns was soon being lionised, doing the rustic bit while enjoying a "Sylvander" to "Clarinda" correspondence with it-girl Agnes M'Lehose. John treated us both to a feeling rendering of "To Mary in Heaven" by the monument in Failford, near where Burns is said to have presented the luckless Highland lass with a hefty two-volume copy of the Bible. The hawthornes still bloomed, or would shortly, and the winding Ayr still wound. But somehow the shortbread-tin gloss on the episode had worn a bit thin.

Opposite Mauchline kirkyard, Poosie Nansie's tavern looked moribund, the randie gangrel bodies declined into a few old men staring morosely into empty beer mugs. Much jollier was another favourite howff, the Globe Inn in Dumfries, which we found bursting at the seams on a Sunday afternoon. Here Burns had his wicked way with the barmaid, Anna Park. We could still, just, decipher the ditties scratched on the grimy panes of an upstairs bedroom window.

The interesting exhibition at the Robert Burns Centre in Dumfries depicts an individual who might charitably be described as mixed-up: at one point himself smuggling canons to French Revolutionaries, the next writing patriotic verses against the Jacobites.

We ended our tour in the lavish embrace of Enterkine House, near Annbank, with not a haggis in sight. As memories of Poosie Nansie's faded into merciful oblivion, I gave silent thanks. A man may be a man for a' that, but a five-star hotel is a five-star hotel.

For further information about Robert Burns sights, contact Ayrshire and Arran tourist board (01292 678100; www.ayrshire-arran.com), Dumfries and Galloway tourist board (01387 253862; www.dumfriesandgalloway.co.uk), Burns National Heritage Park (01292 443700; www.burnsheritagepark.co.uk) and the National Trust for Scotland (0141-616 2266). Dinner, bed and breakfast at Enterkine House (01292 521608; www.enterkine.com) costs £149 per person per night, based on two sharing.