Now that I have started looking again for my James and Jean Currie, I've noticed something interesting. I had always thought that Agnes only went to Coylton from wherever to work in the Manse. However I now see that although James and Jean were married in Tarbolton in 1807, their first two children James and Barbara were born in Coylton but all the rest including Agnes herself were born in Tarbolton. I know that Coylton though a very small village at that time, was mainly occupied by weavers and that is what two of my Draffan's were doing there, although they came from Douglas.
Robert Burns loved the area and his poem "The Soldier's Return" is set in Coylton:
"And for fair Scotia, hame again,
I cheery on did wander;
I thought upon the banks o’ Coil,
I thought upon my Nancy,
And ay I mind’t the witching smile
That caught my youthful fancy.
At length, I reach’d the bonie glen,
Where early life I sported;
I pass’d the mill and trysting thorn,
Where Nancy aft I courted;
Wha’ spied I but my ain dear maid,
And turn’d me round to hide the flood
That in my e’en was swelling."
Nancy is a diminutive for Agnes. I found a fantastic old sketch of the Mill on the net, but the Trysting Thorn is now a new growth from a root of the old tree.