This is the fifth volume of Adam White’s set of eight scrapbook albums, containing 289 items mounted on 202 pages.

The volume covers south-west Scotland, encompassing the historical counties of Bute, Ayrshire, Wigtownshire, Kirkcudbright and Dumfriesshire. Beginning with the islands of Arran and Bute, the volume takes in the landscape, castles and landed estates of the Firth of Clyde and inland Ayrshire, the towns of Ayr and Dumfries, the shores of the Solway, and the marches of the Western Borders.

This however is largely Burns Country, and there is a Burns connection to much of the material collected here by White.

There is no likeness of the poet amongst the portraits, but biographical references include depictions of his birthplace, the place of his death and the Burns Mausoleum in Dumfries.

Other items evoke localities significant in his life and work, such as engravings after D.O. Hill published in The Land of Burns (1840), and a complete pasted-in edition of Storer and Greig’s Views in North Britain, Illustrative of the Works of Robert Burns (1805).

Direct illustrations of Burns’s work include a complete clipped-out set of the wood engravings after Thomas Landseer to accompany ‘Tam O’Shanter’.

Perhaps fittingly, the topographical and architectural prints include over fifty engravings after Burns’s friend the antiquarian Francis Grose, published in his Antiquities of Scotland (1791) for which ‘Tam O’Shanter’ was written.

Other notable items include the satirical print Gisbal's Preferment (1762), lampooning the ministry of the third Earl of Bute; an original of the True narrative of the proceedings of His Majesties privy council in Scotland. For securing the peace of that kingdom in the year 1678; and six hand-coloured aquatints published in William Daniell’s A Voyage Round Great Britain (1814-25).

Original artworks in this volume include a Montague Stanley watercolour and a drawing by the illustrator and wood engraver Ebenezer Landells. Amongst Adam White’s own drawings are another six of the sequence of worked-up tracings from John Clerk of Eldin etchings already found in the second volume of the Symbolae Scoticae.