On the day of the ‘May’ or ‘Cow Fair’ in 1784 the main streets of Irvine, one of the principal towns in Ayrshire, were crowded to excess with those who had come to take part in the fair. It was not unusual for the streets of this busy seaport to be filled with noise and activity. Whilst Irvine was not a prominent manufacturing town it was, as a royal burgh, a major port for local and foreign trade. Consequently its streets often reverberated with noise from the many carts which transported coal and other merchandise to and from the docks. The town was also a busy commercial centre with banks, a town house, merchant houses, shops, and street markets. Home to some fifty vessels, over three hundred sailors, and thirty-eight taverns, it was a ‘town of crowds – meal mobs, redcoats, pressgangs, smugglers, fairs, and the Buchanites’.