Dear Friends, Meg Greenwood asks: "How large an area might 'BURNHOUSE' in Galston have been in its earlier days ? Google maps shows an irregularly shaped area with an X over one of the 2 dozen rooftops. I doubt this one house is 'Burnhouse', must be the area is called that. Am wanting to understand if Burnhouse had many residences or just a few, MURRAYs are hard to find and properly identify if the area is large." And Linda Norby points to a website mentioning 'Laigh Burnhouse'. This suggests Burnhouse may have been a fermtoun of some sort in the early 1700s and was enclosed during the eighteenth century to become more than one farm. Examples can be found all over Scotland of these divisions - such as laigh or low and high (e.g. High Pinmore and Low Pinmore), easter and wester, old and new, meikle or muckle (large or greater) and lesser, upper and nether (lower). By the mid-nineteenth century many of these would probably be distinct separate farms with a farmhouse and cottages and/or a bothy for employees - identifiable on early OS maps. Sometimes a small group of cottages in a hamlet remained after enclosure. Using the Old Statistical Account, Tom Devine argues in his 1994 book 'The Transformation of Rural Scotland' that by the 1790s enclosure was quite advanced in Ayrshire (pub John Donald, p 52). You might want to take a look at the statistical accounts for the relevant parishes. http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/ Prof Charles Withers has written about these sources here: http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/reading/intro.shtml This change in land organisation was part of a period of transformation, increased agricultural efficiency and increased production during which many Ayrshire farms came to specialise in dairy cattle (developing the brown and white Ayrshire breed) and dairy produce for the industrialised villages and towns (and once the railways were in place, for Glasgow). I didn't spot Burnhouse on the Roy map of 1752-55 (lowlands), but this doesn't mean it wasn't there http://maps.nls.uk/geo/roy/ It looks as if the Loudon estate was prominent in this area at that time as was Cessnock Tower. Burnhouse does appear on the 1860 first edition of the 6 inch OS (Ayrshire sheet XXIV). It has an old coal pit and a saw mill marked, so appears to be a small village. If you look at the neighbouring sheet there is Burnhousehill - a distinct farm (Ayrshire XXIII). I didn't manage to find the present day High Burnhouse (the livery yard) on the early OS map or the current one. The current OS 1:25,000 map shows only Burnhousehill and Burnhouse. The NLS maps are always worth browsing http://maps.nls.uk/index.html A helpful reference work on Scottish place names is the OS's 'Guide to Scots origins of place names in Britain' available from: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/freefun/didyouknow/placenames/index.html as a pdf. Burn is a word for a stream - so Burnhouse is quite a common name in Scotland as is Burnfoot. Best wishes and happy researching, Kay Edinburgh